The bee-master of Warrilow

ALBERT R. MANN
LIBRARY

New York State Colleges

of

Agriculture and Home Economics

at
Cornell University

EVERETT FRANKLIN PHILLIPS
BEEKEEPING LIBRARY

Cornell University
Library

The original of this book is in
the Cornell University Library.

There are no known copyright restrictions in
the United States on the use of the text.

http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924003203175

THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

THE BEE-MASTER
OF WARRILOW

BY

TIGKNER EDWARDES

PRLLOW OF THE ENTOMOLOGICAL SOCIETY OP LONDON
AUTHOR OF " THE LOBE OF THE HONEV-BBB "

THIRD EDITION

METHUEN & CO. LTD.

36 ESSEX STREET W.C.

LONDON

•^

F

First Published 1007

Second Edition (Methuen &° Co. Ltd.) Revised and Enlarged . jqzo
Third Edition 1921

These Essays are reprinted by the courtesy of the Proprietor
of " The Pall Mall Gazette."

DEDICATION

TO THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW's
OLDEST AND STAUNCHEST FRIEND,

T. W. LITTLETON HAY

THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED
BY THE WRITER

PREFACE TO NEW EDITION

' I k HE original " Bee-Master of Warrilow " —
■*■ that queer little honey-coloured book of far-
off days — contained but eleven chapters : in its
present edition the book has grown to more than
three times its former length, and constitutes prac-
tically a new volume.

To those who knew and loved the old " Bee-
Master of Warrilow," no apology for the
additional chapters will be required, because it is
directly to the solicitation of many of them that this
larger collection of essays on English bee-garden
life owes its appearance. And equally, to those who
will make the old bee-man's acquaintance for the
first time in these present pages, little need be said.
In spite of the War, the honey-bee remains the same
mysterious, fascinating creature that she has ever
been; and the men who live by the fruit of her toil
share with her the like changeless quality. The
Master of Warrilow and his bees can very well be
left to win their own way into the hearts of new

readers as they did with the old.

T. E.
The Red Cottage,

Burpham, Arundel,
Sussex.

CONTENTS

CHAP.

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

I. THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

II. FEBRUARY AMONGST THE HIVES

III. A TWENTIETH CENTURY BEE-FARMER

IV. CHLOE AMONG THE BEES .

V. A BEE-MAN OF THE 'FORTIES .

VI. HEREDITY IN THE BEE-GARDEN

VII. NIGHT ON A HONEY-FARM

VIII. IN A BEE-CAMP

IX. THE BEE-HUNTERS .

X. THE PHYSICIAN IN THE HIVE .

XI. WINTER WORK ON THE BEE-FARM

XII. THE QUEEN BEE : IN ROMANCE
REALITY ....

XIII. THE SONG OF THE HIVES

XIV. CONCERNING HONEY

XV. IN THE ABBOT'S BEE-GARDEN .

9

AND

PAGE

7

13
17
24
31

37
44
52
59
65
73
80
86

93
100
107
"3

io THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

CHAP.
XVI. BEES AND THEIR MASTERS

XVII. THE HONEY THIEVES

XVIII. THE STORY OF THE SWARM

XIX. THE MIND IN THE HIVE .

XX. THE KING'S BEE-MASTER

XXI. POLLEN AND THE BEE

XXII. THE HONEY-FLOW .

XXIII. SUMMER LIFE IN A BEE-HIVE .

XXIV. THE YELLOW PERIL IN HIVELAND
XXV. THE UNBUSY BEE .

XXVI. THE LONG NIGHT IN THE HIVE .
XXVII. THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BEE-GARDEN
XXVIII. HONEY-CRAFT OLD AND NEW .
XXIX. THE BEE-MILK MYSTERY
XXX. THE BEE-BURNERS .
XXXI. EVOLUTION OF THE MODERN HIVE

PAG B
120

126
132
139
145
152
158
164
170
176
182
189
196
202
209
214

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

A corner IN the BEE-GARDEN ; Frontispiece

brood-comb, showing two sizes of cell Facing page 24

THE BEE-MASTER S COTTAGE .
THE WAX MAKERS ....
HARD TIMES FOR THE BEES .
HONEY-COMB: ITS VARIOUS STAGES
HIVING A SWARM ....

1. UFWARD-BUILT COMB .

2. UPWARD-BUILT COMB .

THE GUARDIAN OF THE HIVES

A NATURAL HONEY-BEE'S NEST

OLD COTTAGE-RUIN, WITH RECESSES FOR
HIVES ,

46
60

86
108
134
152
160
176
192

214

INTRODUCTION

AMONG the beautiful things of the country-
side, which are slowly but surely passing
away, must be reckoned the old Bee Gardens —
fragrant, sunny nooks of blossom, where the bees
are housed only in the ancient straw skeps, and have
their, own way -in everything, the work of the bee-
keeper being little more than a placid looking-on at
events of which it would have been heresy to doubt
the finite perfection.

To say, however, that modern ideas of progress
in bee-farming must inevitably rob the pursuit of all
its old-world poetry and picturesqueness, would be
to represent the case in an unnecessarily bad light.
The latter-day beehive, it is true, has little more
aesthetic value than a Brighton bathing-machine;
and the new class of bee-keepers, which is spring-
ing up all over the country, is composed mainly of
people who have taken to the calling as they would
to any other lucrative business, having, for the
most part, nothing but a good-humoured contempt
alike for the old-fashioned bee-keeper and the
ancient traditions and superstitions of his craft.

Nor can the inveterate, old-time skeppist himself
— the man who obstinately shuts his eyes to all that
is good and true in modern bee-science — be counted

*3

i 4 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

on to help in the preservation of the beautiful old
gardens, or in keeping alive customs which have
been handed down from generation to generation,
almost unaltered, for literally thousands of years.
Here and there, in the remoter parts of the country,
men can still be found who keep their bees much
in the same way as bees were kept in the time of
Columella or Virgil; and are content with as little
profit. But these form a rapidly diminishing class.
The advantages of modern methods are too over-
whelmingly apparent. The old school must choose
between the adoption of latter-day systems, or
suffer the only alternative — that of total extinction
at no very distant date.

Luckily for English bee-keeping, there is a third
class upon which the hopes of all who love the
ancient ways and days, and yet recognise the
absorbing interest and value of modern research in
apiarian science, may legitimately rely. Born and
bred amongst the hives, and steeped from their
earliest years in the lore of their skeppist forefathers,
these interesting folk seem, nevertheless, imbued
to the core with the very spirit of progress. While
retaining an unlimited affection for all the quaint
old methods in bee-keeping, they maintain them-
selves, unostentatiously, but very thoroughly,
abreast of the times. Nothing new is talked of in
the world of bees that these people do not make
trial of, and quietly adopt into their daily practice,
if really serviceable; or as quietly discard, if the
contrivance prove to have little else than novelty to
recommend it.

As a rule, they are reserved, silent men, difficult
of approach; and yet, when once on terms of

INTRODUCTION 15

familiarity, they make the most charming of
companions. Then they are ever ready to talk
about their bees, or discuss the latest improvements
in apiculture; to explain the intricacies of bee-life,
as revealed by the foremost modern observers, or
to dilate by the hour on the astounding delusions
of mediaeval times. But they all seem to possess
one invariable characteristic — that of whole-hearted
reverence for the customs of their immediate ances-
tors, their own fathers and grandfathers. In a long
acquaintance with bee-men of this class, I have
never yet met with one who could be trapped into
any decided admission of defect in the old methods,
which — to say truth — were often as senseless as they
were futile, even when not directly contrary to the
interest of the bee-owner, or the plain, obvious dic-
tates of humanity. In this they form a refreshing
contrast to the ultra-modern, pushing young
apiculturist of to-day; and it is as a type of this
class that the Bee-Master of Warrilow is presented
to the reader.

THE BEE-MASTER OF
WARRILOW

CHAPTER I

THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

T ONG, lithe, and sinewy, with three score
•*-' years of sunburn on his keen, gnarled face,
and the sure stride of a mountain goat, the Bee-
Master of Warrilow struck you at once as a notable
figure in any company.

Warrilow is a little precipitous village tucked
away under the green brink of the Sussex Downs;
and the bee-farm lay on the southern slope of the
hill, with a sheltering barrier of pine above, in
which, all day long, the winter wind kept up an
impotent complaining. But below, among the
hives, nothing stirred in the frosty, sun-riddled air.
Now and again a solitary worker-bee darted up from
a hive door, took a brisk turn or two in the dazzling
light, then hurried home again to the warm cluster.
But the flash and quiver of wings, and the drowsy
song of summer days, were gone in the iron-bound
January weather; and the bee-master was lounging
idly to and fro in the great main-way of the waxen
B 17

18 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

city, shot-gun under arm, and with apparently
nothing more to do than to meditate over past
achievements, or to plan out operations for the
season to come.

As I approached, the sharp report of the gun rang
out, and a little cloud of birds went chippering
fearsomely away over the hedgerow. The old man
watched them as they flew off dark against the
snowy hillside. He threw out the cartridge-cases
disgustedly.

" Blue-tits!" said he. " They are the great pest
of the bee-keeper in winter time. When the snow
covers the ground, and the frost has driven all
insect-life deep into the crevices of the trees, all the
blue-caps for miles round trek to the bee-gardens.
Of course, if the bees would only keep indoors they
would be safe enough. But the same cause that
drives the birds in lures the bees out. The snow
reflects the sunlight up through the hive-entrances,
and they think the bright days of spring have come,
and out they flock to their death. And winter is
just the time when every single bee is valuable. In
summer a few hundreds more or less make little
difference, when in every hive young bees are
maturing at the rate of several thousands a day
to take the place of those that perish. But now
every bee captured by the tits is an appreciable loss
to the colony. They are all nurse-bees in the winter-
hives, and on them depends the safe hatching-out of
the first broods in the spring season. So the bee-
keeper would do well to include a shot-gun among
his paraphernalia, unless he is willing to feed all the
starving tits of the countryside at the risk of his
year's harvest,"

THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW 19

" But the blue-cap," he went on, " is not always
content to wait for his breakfast until the bees
voluntarily bring it to him. He has a trick of
enticing them out of the hive which is often success-
ful even in the coldest weather. Come into the
extracting-house yonder, and I may be able to show
you what I mean."

He led the way to a row of outbuildings which
flanked the northern boundary of the garden and
formed additional shelter from the blustering gale.
A window of the extracting-house overlooked the
whole extent of hives. Opening this from within
with as little noise as possible, the bee-master put a
strong field-glass into my hand.

" Now that we are out of sight," he said, " the
tits will soon be back again. There they come —
whole families of them together! Now watch that
green hive over there under the apple-tree."

Looking through the glass, I saw that about a
dozen tits had settled in the tree. Their bright
plumage contrasted vividly with the sober green
and grey of the lichened boughs, as they swung
themselves to and fro in the sunshine. But
presently the boldest of them gave up this pretence
of searching for food among the branches, and
hopped down upon the alighting-board of the hive.
At once two or three others followed him; and then
began an ingenious piece of business. The little
company fell to pecking at the hard wood with
their bills, striking out a sharp ringing tattoo
plainly audible even where we lay hidden. The old
bee-man snorted contemptuously, and the cart-
ridges slid home into the breech of his gun with a
vicious snap.

20 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

" Now keep an eye on the hive-entrance," he
said grimly.

The glass was a good one. Now I could
plainly make out a movement in this direction.
The noise and vibration made by the birds outside
had roused the slumbering colony to a sense of
danger. About a dozen bees ran out to see what it
all meant, and were immediately pounced upon.
And then the gun spoke over my head. It was a
shot into the air, but it served its harmless purpose.
From every bush and tree there came over to
us a dull whirr of wings like far-off thunder, as
the blue marauders sped away for the open
country, filling the air with their frightened jingling
note.

Perhaps of all cosy retreats from the winter blast
it has ever been my good fortune to discover, the
extracting-room on Warrilow bee-farm was the
brightest and most comfortable. In summer-time
the whole life of the apiary centred here; and the
stress and bustle, inevitable during the season of
the great honey-flow, obscured its manifold possi-
bilities. But in winter the extracting-machines were,
for the most part, silent; and the natural serenity
and cosiness of the place reasserted themselves
triumphantly. From the open furnace-door a
ruddy warmth and glow enriched every nook and
corner of the long building. The walls were lined
with shelves where the polished tin vessels, in
which the surplus honey was stored, gave back
the fire-shine in a hundred flickering points of amber
light. The work of hive-making in the neighbour-
ing sheds was going briskly forward, but the noise
of hammering, the shrill hum of sawing and planing

THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW 21

machinery, and the intermittent cough of the oil-
engine reached us only as a subdued, tranquil
murmur — the very voice of rest.

The bee-master closed the window behind its thick
bee-proof curtains, and, putting his gun away in a
corner, drew a comfortable high-backed settle near
to the cheery blaze. Then he disappeared for a
moment, and returned with a dusty cobweb-shrouded
bottle, which he carried in a wicker cradle as a
butler would bear priceless old wine. The cork
came out with a ringing jubilant report, and the
pale, straw-coloured liquid foamed into the glasses
like champagne. It stilled at once, leaving the
whole inner surface of the glass veneered with
golden bells. The old bee-man held it up critically
against the light.

" The last of 19—," he said, regretfully. " The
finest mead year in this part of the country for
many a decade back. Most people have never
tasted the old Anglo-Saxon drink that King Alfred
loved, and probably Harold's men made merry with
on the eve of Hastings. So they can't be expected
to know that metheglin varies with each season as
much as wine from the grape."

Of the goodness of the liquor there admitted no
question. It had the bouquet of a ripe Ribston
pippin, and the potency of East Indian sherry thrice
round the Horn. But its flavour entirely eluded
all attempt at comparison. There was a sugges-
tive note of fine old perry about it, and a dim
reminder of certain almost colourless Rhenish wines,
never imported, and only to be encountered in
moments of rare and happy chance. Yet neither of
these parallels came within a sunbeam's length of

22 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRlLOW

the truth about this immaculate honey-vintage of
Warrilow. Pondering over the liquor thus, the
thought came to me that nothing less than a
supreme occasion could have warranted its
production to-day. And this conjecture was immedi-
ately verified. The bee-master raised his glass
above his head.

"To the Bees of Warrilow!" he said, lapsing
into the broad Sussex dialect, as he always did when
much moved by his theme. " Forty-one years ago
to-day the first stock I ever owned was fixed up out
there under the old codlin-tree; and now there are
two hundred and twenty of them. 'Twas before
you were born, likely as not; and bee science has
seen many changes since then. In those days there
were nothing but the old straw skeps, and most
bee-keepers knew as little about the inner life of
their bees as we do of the bottom of the South
Pacific. Now things are very different; but the
improvement is mostly in the bee-keepers them-
selves. The bees are exactly as they always have
been, and work on the same principles as they did
in the time of Solomon. They go their appointed
way inexorably, and all the bee-master can do is to
run on ahead and smooth the path a little for them.
Indeed, after forty odd years of bee-keeping, I
doubt if the bees even realise that they are ' kept '
at all. The bee-master's work has little more to
do with their progress than the organ-blower's
with the tune."

" Can you," I asked him, as we parted, " after all
these years of experience, lay down for beginners
in beemanship one royal maxim of success above
any other? "

THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW 23

He thought it over a little, the gun on his
shoulder again.

" Well, they might take warning from this same
King Solomon," he said, " and beware the foreign
feminine element. Let British bee-keepers cease to
import queen bees from Italy and elsewhere, and
stick to the good old English Black. All my bees
are of this strain, and mostly from one pure
original Sussex stock. The English black bee is a
more generous honey-maker in indifferent seasons;
she does not swarm so determinedly, under proper
trer l ment, as the Ligurians or Carniolans; and,
above all, though she is not so handsome as some
of her Continental rivals, she comes of a hardy
northern race, and stands the ups and downs of the
British winter better than any of the fantastic
yellow-girdled crew from overseas."

CHAPTER II

FEBRUARY AMONGST THE HIVES

HP HE midday sun shone warm from a cloudless
sky. Up in the highest elm-tops the south-
west wind kept the chattering starlings gently
swinging, but below in the bee-garden scarce a
breath moved under the rich soft light.

As I lifted the latch of the garden-gate, the sharp
click brought a stooping figure erect in the midst of
the hives; and the bee-master came down the red-
tiled winding path to meet me. He carried a box
full of some yellowish powdery substance in one
hand, and a big pitcher of water in the other; and
as usual, his shirt-sleeves were tucked up to
the shouldef, baring his weather-browned arms to
the morning sun.

" When do we begin the year's bee-work? " he
said, repeating my question amusedly. " Why, we
began on New Year's morning. And last year's
work was finished on Old Year's night. If you go
with the times, every day in the year has its work
on a modern bee-farm, either indoors or out."

" But it is on these first warm days of spring,"

he continued, as I followed him into the thick of

the hives, " that outdoor work for the bee-man

starts in earnest. The bees began long ago.

/ 24

BROOD-COMB : SHOWING TWO SIZES OF CELL BEING MADE SIDE BY SIDE

FEBRUARY AMONGST THE HIVES 25

January was not out before the first few eggs were
laid right in the centre of the brood-combs. And
from now on, if only we manage properly, each bee-
colony will go on increasing until, in the height of
the season, every queen will be laying from two
thousand to three thousand eggs a day."

He stopped and set down his box and his pitcher.

" If we manage properly. But there's the rub.
Success in bee-keeping is all a question of numbers.
The more worker-bees there are when the honey-
flow begins, the greater will be the honey-harvest.
The whole art of the bee-keeper consists in main-
taining a steady increase in population from the
first moment the queens begin to lay in January,
until the end of May brings on the rush of the white
clover, and every bee goes mad with work from
morning to night. Of course, in countries where
the climate is reasonable, and the year may be
counted on to warm up steadily month by month,
all this is fairly easy; but with topsy-turvy weather,
such as we get in England, it is a vastly different
matter. Just listen to the bees now ! And this
is only February ! "

A deep vibrating murmur was upon the air. It
came from all sides of us; it rose from under foot,
where the crocuses were blooming; it seemed to
fill the blue sky above with an ocean of sweet
sound. The sunlight was alive with scintillating
points of light, like cast handfuls of diamonds, as
the bees darted hither and thither, or hovered in
little joyous companies round every hive. They
swept to and fro between us; gambolled about our
heads; came with a sudden shrill menacing note and
scrutinised our mouths, our ears, our eyes, or

26 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

settled on our hands and faces, comfortably, and
with no apparent haste to be gone. The bee-master
noted my growing uneasiness, not to say trepidation.

" Don't be afraid," he said. "It is only their
companionableness. They won't sting — at least,
not if you give them their way. But now come and
see what we are doing to help on the queens in
their work."

At different stations in the garden I had noticed
some shallow wooden trays standing among the
hives. The old bee-man led the way to one of these.
Here the humming was louder and busier than
ever. The tray was full of fine wood-shavings,
dusted over with the yellow powder from the bee-
master's box; and scores of bees were at work in
it, smothering themselves from head to foot, and
flying off like golden millers to the hives.

" This is pea-flour," explained the master,
" and it takes the place of pollen as food for the
young bees, until the spring flowers open and the
natural supply is available. This forms the first
step in the bee-keeper's work of patching up the
defective English climate. From the beginning
our policy is to deceive the queens into the belief
that all is prosperity and progress outside. We
keep all the hives well covered up, and contract the
entrances, so that a high temperature is maintained
within, and the queens imagine summer is already
advancing. Then they see the pea-flour coming in
plentifully, and conclude that the fields and hillsides
are covered with flowers; for they never come out
of the hives except at swarming-time, and must
judge of the year by what they see around them.
Then in a week or two we shall put the spring-

FEBRUARY AMONGST THE HIVES 27

feeders on, and give each hive as much syrup as the
bees can take down; and this, again, leads the
queens into the belief that the year's food-supply
has begun in earnest. The result is that the winter
lethargy in the hive is soon completely overthrown,
the queens begin to lay unrestrictedly, and the whole
colony is forging on towards summer strength long
before there is any natural reason for it."

We were stooping down, watching the bees at
the nearest hive. A little cloud of them was
hovering in the sunshine, heads towards the
entrance, keeping up a shrill jovial contented note
as they flew. Others were roving round with a
vagrant, workless air, singing a low desultory
song as they trifled about among the crocuses,
passing from gleaming white to rich purple, then
to gold, and back again to white, just as the mood
took them. In the hive itself there was evidently a
kind of spring-cleaning well in progress. Hundreds
of the bees were bringing out minute sand-coloured
particles, which accumulated on the alighting-
board visibly as we watched. Now and again a
worker came backing out, dragging a dead bee
laboriously after her. Instantly two or three others
rushed to help in the task, and between them
they tumbled the carcass over the edge of the foot-
board down among the grass below. Sometimes
the burden was of a pure white colour, like the
ghost of a bee, perfect in shape, with beady black eyes,
and its colourless wings folded round it like a cere-
cloth'. Then it seemed to be less weighty, and its
carrier usually shouldered the gruesome thing, and
flew away with it high up into the sunshine, and
swiftly out of view.

28 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRIL'OW

" Those are the undertakers," said the bee-
master, ruminatively filling a pipe. " Their work
is to carry the dead out of the hive. That last was one
of the New Year's brood, and they often die in the
cell like that, especially at the beginning of the
season. All that fine drift is the cell-cappings
thrown down during the winter from time to time
as the stores were broached, and every warm day
sees them cleaning up the hive in this way. And
now watch these others — these that are coming and
going straight in and out of the hive."

I followed the pointing pipe-stem. The alighting-
stage was covered with a throng of bees, each busily
intent on some particular task. But every now and
then a bee emerged from the hive with a rush,
elbowed her way excitedly through the crowd, and
darted straight off into the sunshine without an
instant's pause. In the same way others were re-
turning, and as swiftly disappearing into the hive.

" Those are the water-carriers," explained the
master. " Water is a constant need in bee-life
almost the whole year round. It is used to soften
the mixture of honey and pollen with which the
young grubs and newly-halched bees are fed; and
the old bees require a lot of it to dilute their winter
stores. The river is the traditional watering-place
for my bees here, and in the summer it serves very
well; but in the winter hundreds are lost either
through cold or drowning. And so at this time we
give them a water-supply close at home."

He took up his pitcher, and led the way to the
other end of the garden. Here, on a bench, he
showed me a long row of glass jars full of water,
standing mouth downward, each on its separate

FEBRUARY AMONGST THE HIVES 29

plate of blue china. The water was oozing out
round the edges of the jars, and scores of the
bees were drinking at it side by side, like cattle at
a trough.

" We give it them lukewarm," said the old bee-
man, " and always mix salt with it. If we had
sea-water here, nothing would be better; seaside
bees often go down to the shore to drink, as you
may prove for yourself on any fine day in summer.
Why are all the plates blue ? Bees are as fanciful
in their ways as our own women-folk, and in
nothing more than on the question of colour. Just
this particular shade of light blue seems to attract
them more than any other. Next to that, pure
white is a favourite with them; but they have a
pronounced dislike to anything brilliantly red, as
all the old writers about bees noticed hundreds of
years ago. If I were to put some of the drinking-
jars on bright red saucers now, you would not see
half as many bees on them as on the pale blue."

We moved on to the extracting-house, whence
the master now fetched his smoker, and a curious
knife, with a broad and very keen-looking blade.
He packed the tin nozzle of the smoker with
rolled brown paper, lighted it, and, by means of
the little bellows underneath, soon blew it up into
full strength. Then he went to one of the
quietest hives, where only a few bees were wander-
ing aimlessly about, and sent a dense stream of
smoke into the entrance. A moment later he had
taken the roof and coverings off, and was lifting
out the central comb-frames one by one, with the
bees clinging in thousands all about them.

" Now," he said, " we have come to what is

30 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

really the most important operation of all in the
bee-keeper's work of stimulating his stocks for
the coming" season. Here in the centre of each
comb you see the young brood; but all the cells
above and around it are full of honey, still sealed
over and untouched by the bees. The stock is
behind time. The queen must be roused at once
to her responsibilities, and here is one very simple
and effective way of doing it."

He took the knife, deftly shaved off the cap-
pings from the honey-cells of each comb, and as
quickly returned the frames, dripping with honey,
to the brood-nest. In a few seconds the hive was
comfortably packed down again, and he was
looking round for the next languid stock.

" All these slow, backward colonies," said the
bee-master, as he puffed away with his smoker,
" will have to be treated after the same fashion.
The work must be smartly done, or you will chill
the brood; but, in uncapping the stores like this,
right in the centre of the brood-nest, the effect
on the stock is magical. The whole hive reeks
with the smell of honey, and such evidence of
prosperity is irresistible. To-morrow, if you come
this way, you will see all these timorous bee-folk
as busy as any in the garden."

CHAPTER III

A TWENTIETH CENTURY BEE-FARMER

TT was sunny spring in the bee-garden. The
thick elder-hedge to the north was full of
young green leaf; everywhere the trim footways
between the hives were marked by yellow bands
of crocus-bloom, and daffodils just showing a
golden promise of what they would be in a few
warm days to come. From a distance I had
caught the fresh spring song of the hives, and
had seen the bee-master and his men at work in
different quarters of the mimic city. But now,
drawing nearer, I observed they were intent on
what seemed to me a perfectly astounding enter-
prise. Each man held a spoon in one hand and
a bowl of what I now knew to be pea-flour in the
other, and I saw that they were busily engaged in
filling the crocus-blossoms up to the brim with this
inestimable condiment. My friend the bee-master
looked up on my approach, and, as was his wont,
forestalled the inevitable questioning.

" This is another way of giving it," he
explained, " and the best of all in the earliest part
of the season. Instinct leads the bees to the flowers
for pollen-food when they will not look for it else-

3 1

32 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

where; and as the natural supply is very meagre,
we just help them in this way."

As he spoke I became rather unpleasantly aware
of a change of manners on the part of his winged
people. First one and then another came harping
round, and, settling comfortably on my face,
showed no inclination to move again. In my
ignorance I was for brushing them off, but the bee-
master came hurriedly to my rescue. He dislodged
them with a few gentle puffs from his tobacco-pipe.

" That is always their way in the spring-time,"
he explained. " The warmth of the skin attracts
them, and the best thing to do is to take no notice.
If you had knocked them off you would probably
have been stung."

"Is it true that a bee can only sting once? "
I asked him, as he bent again over the crocus
beds.

He laughed.

" What would be the good of a sword to a
soldier," he said, " if only one blow could be
struck with it? It is certainly true that the bee
does not usually sting a second time, but that is
only because you are too hasty with her. You
brush her off before she has had time to complete
her business, and the barbed sting, holding in the
wound, is torn away, and the bee dies. But now
watch how the thing works naturally."

A bee had settled on his hand as he was speaking.
He closed his fingers gently over it, and forced
it to sting.

" Now," he continued, quite unconcernedly,
" look what really happens. The bee makes two
or three lunges before she gets the sting fairly

A TWENTIETH CENTURY BEE-FARMER 33

home. Then the poison is injected. Now watch
what she does afterwards. See! she has finished
her work, and is turning round and round! The
barbs are arranged spirally on the sting, and she
is twisting it out corkscrew-fashion. Now she is
free again ! there she goes, you see, weapon and
all; and ready to sting again if necessary."

The crocus-filling operation was over now, and
the bee-master took up his barrow and led the way
to a row of hives in the sunniest part of the
garden. He pulled up before the first of the hives,
and lighted his smoking apparatus.

" These," he said, as he fell to work, " have not
been opened since October, and it is high time we
saw how things are going with them."

He drove a few strong puffs of smoke into the
entrance of the hive and removed the lid. Three
or four thicknesses of warm woollen quilting lay
beneath. Under these a square of linen covered
the tops of the frames, to which it had been firmly
propolised by the bees. My friend began to peel
this carefully off, beginning at one corner and
using the smoker freely as the linen ripped
away.

" This was a full-weight hive in the autumn," he
said, " so there was no need for candy- feeding.
But they must be pretty near the end of their stores
now. You see how they are all together on the
three or four frames in the centre of the hive?
The other combs are quite empty and deserted.
And look how near they are clustering to the top
of the bars! Bees always feed upwards, and that
means we must begin spring-feeding right away."
He turned to the barrow, on which was a large
C

34 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

box, lined with warm material, and containing bar
frames full of sealed honeycomb.

" These are extra combs from last summer. I
keep them in a warm cupboard over the stove at
about the same temperature as the hive we are
going to put them into. But first they must be
uncapped. Have you ever seen the Bingham
used ? "

From the inexhaustible barrow he produced the
long knife with the broad, flat blade; and, poising
the frame of honeycomb vertically on his knee, he
removed the sheet of cell-caps with one dexterous
cut, laying the honey bare from end to end. This
frame was then lowered into the hive with the
uncapped side close against the clustering bees.
Another comb, similarly treated, was placed on the
opposite flank of the cluster. Outside each of
these a second full comb was as swiftly brought
into position. Then the sliding inner walls of the
brood-nest were pushed up close to the frame, and
the quilts and roof restored. The whole seemed
the work of a few moments at the outside.

" All this early spring work," said the bee-
master, as we moved to the next hive, " is based
upon the recognition of one thing. In the south
here the real great honey-flow comes all at once :
very often the main honey-harvest for the year has
to be won or lost during three short weeks of
summer. The bees know this, and from the first
days of spring they have only the one idea — to create
an immense population, so that when the honey-flow
begins there may be no lack of harvesters. But
against this main idea there is another one — their
ingrained and invincible caution. Not an egg will

A TWENTIETH CENTURY BEE-FARMER 35

be laid nor a grub hatched unless there is reason-
able chance of subsistence for it. The populace
of the hive must be increased only in proportion
to the amount of stores coming in. With a good
spring, and the early honey plentiful, the queen will
increase her production of eggs with every day, and
the population of the hive will advance accordingly.
But if, on the very brink of the great honey-flow,
there comes, as is so often the case, a spell of cold
windy weather, laying is stopped at once; and, if
the cold continues, all hatching grubs are destroyed
and the garrison put on half-rations. And so the
work of months is undone."

He stooped to bring his friendly pipe to my
succour again, for a bee was trying to get down
my collar in the most unnerving way, and another
had apparently mistaken my mouth for the front-
door of his hive. The intruders happily driven off,
the master went back to his work and his talk
together.

" But it is just here that the art of the bee-
keeper comes in. He must prevent this interruption
to progress by maintaining the confidence of the
bees in the season. He must create an artificial
plenty until the real prosperity begins. Yet, after
all, he must never lose sight of the main principle,
of carrying out the ideas of the bees, not his own.
In good beemanship there is only one road to
success : you must study to find out what^ the bees
intend to do, and then help them to do it. They
call us bee-masters, but bee-servants would be much
the better name. The bees have their definite plan
of life, perfected through countless ages, and
nothing you can do will ever turn them from it.

36 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

You can delay their work, or you can even thwart
it altogether, but no one has ever succeeded in
changing a single principle in bee-life. And so the
best bee-master is always the one who most exactly
obeys the orders from the hive."

CHAPTER IV

CHLOE AMONG THE BEES

'T'HE bee-mistress looked at my card, then
put its owner under a like careful scrutiny.
In the shady garden where we stood, the sunlight
fell in quivering golden splashes round our feet.
High overhead, in the purple elm-blossom, the bees
and the glad March wind made rival music. Higher
still a ripple of lark-song hung in the blue, and a
score of rooks were sailing by, filling the morning
with their rich, deep clamour of unrest.

The bee-mistress drew off her sting-proof gloves
in thoughtful deliberation.

" If I show you the bee-farm," said she, eyeing
me somewhat doubtfully, " and let you see what
women have done and are doing in an ideal feminine
industry, will you promise to write of us with
seriousness? I mean, will you undertake to deal
with the matter for what it is — a plain, business
enterprise by business people — and not treat it
flippantly, just because no masculine creature has
had a hand in it? "

" This is an attempt," she went on — the needful
assurances having been given—" an attempt, and,
we believe, a real solution to a very real difficulty.
There are thousands of educated women in the

37

38 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRtLOW

towns who have to earn their own bread; and they
do it usually by trying to compete with men in walks
of life for which they are wholly unsuited. Now,
why do they not come out into the pure air and
quiet of the countryside, and take up any one of
several pursuits open there to a refined, well-bred
woman? Everywhere the labourers are forsaking
the land and crowding into the cities. That is a
farmers' problem, with which, of course, women
have nothing to do. The rough, heavy work in
the cornfields must always be done either by men
or machinery. But there are certain employments,
even in the country, that women can invariably
undertake better than men, and bee-keeping is one
of them. The work is light. It needs just that
delicacy and deftness of touch that only a woman
can bring to it. It is profitable. Above all, there
is nothing about it, from first to last, of an
objectionable character, demanding masculine inter-
ference. In poultry-farming, good as it is for
women, there must always be a stony-hearted man
about the place to do unnameable necessary things
in a fluffy back-shed. But bee-keeping is clean,
clever, humanising, open-air work — essentially
women's work all through."

She had led the way through the scented old-
fashioned garden, towards a gate in the farther wall,
talking as she went. Now she paused, with her
hand on the latch.

" This," she said, " we call the Transition Gate.
It divides our work from our play. On this side
of it we have the tennis-court and the croquet, and
other games that women love, young or old. But
it is all serious business on the other side. And

CHLOE AMONG THE BEES 39

now you shall see our latter-day Eden, with its one
unimportant omission."

As the door swung back to her touch, the
murmur that was upon the air grew suddenly in
force and volume. Looking through, I saw an old
orchard, spacious, sun-riddled, carpeted with green;
and, stretching away under the ancient apple-boughs,
long, neat rows of hives, a hundred or more, all
alive with bees, winnowing the March sunshine with
their myriad wings.

Here and there in the shade-dappled pleasance
figures were moving about, busily at work among
the hives, figures of women clad in trim holland
blouses, and wearing bee-veils, through which only
a dim guess at the face beneath could be hazarded.
Laughter and talk went to and fro in the sun-
steeped quiet of the place; and one of the fair bee-
gardeners near at hand — young and pretty, I could
have sworn, although her blue gauze veil disclosed
provokingly little — was singing to herself, as she
stooped over an open hive, and lifted the crowded
brood-frames one by one up into the light of
day.

" The great work of the year is just beginning
with us," explained the bee-mistress. " In these
first warm days of spring every hive must be opened
and its condition ascertained. Those that are short
of stores must be fed; backward colonies must be
quickened to a sense of their responsibilities.
Clean hives must be substituted for the old, winter-
soiled dwellings. Queens that are past their prime
will have to be dethroned, and their places filled by
younger and more vigorous successors. But it is
all typically women's work. You have an old

40 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

acquaintance with the lordly bee-master and his
ways; now come and see how a woman manages."

We passed over to the singing lady in the veil,
and — from a safe distance — watched her at her
work. Each frame, as it was raised out of the
seething abyss of the hive, was turned upside
down and carefully examined. A little vortex of
bees swung round her head, shrilling vindictively.
Those on the uplifted comb-frames hustled to and
fro like frightened sheep, or crammed themselves
head foremost into the empty cells, out of reach of
the disturbing light.

" That is a queenless stock," said the bee-mistress.
"It is going to be united with another colony,
where there is a young, high-mettled ruler in want
of subjects."

We watched the bee-gardener as she went to one
of the neighbouring hives, subdued and opened it,
drew out all the brood-combs, and brought them
over in a carrying-rack, with the bees clustering in
thousands all about them. Then a scent-diffuser was
brought into play, and the fragrance of lavender-
water came over to us, as the combs of both hives
were quickly sprayed with the perfume, then
lowered into the hive, a frame from each stock
alternately. It was the old time-honoured plan for
uniting bee-colonies, by impregnating them with
the same odour, and so inducing the bees to live
together peaceably, where otherwise a deadly war
might ensue. But the whole operation was carried
through with a neat celerity, and light, dexterous
handling, I had never seen equalled by any man.

" That girl," said the bee-mistress, as we moved
away, " came to me out of a London office a year

CHLOE AMONG THE BEES 41

ago, anaemic, pale as the paper she typed on all day
for a living. Now she is well and strong, and
almost as brown as the bees she works among so
willingly. All my girls here have come to me from
time to time in the same way out of the towns, for-
saking indoor employment that was surely stunting
all growth of mind and body. And there are
thousands who would do the same to-morrow, if
only the chance could be given them."

We stopped in the centre of the old orchard.
Overhead the swelling fruit-buds glistened against
the blue sky. Merry thrush-music rang out far
and near. Sun and shadow, the song of the bees,
laughing voices, a snatch of an old Sussex chantie,
the perfume of violet-beds and nodding gillyflowers,
all came over to us through the lichened tree-stems,
in a flood of delicious colour and scent and sound.
The bee-mistress turned to me, triumphantly.

" Would any sane woman," she asked, " stop
in the din and dirt of a smoky city, if she could come
and work in a place like this ? Bee-keeping for
women! do you not see what a chance it opens up
to poor toiling folk, pining for fresh air and sun-
shine, especially to the office-girl class, girls often
of birth and refinement — just that kind of poor
gentlewomen whose breeding and social station
render them most difficult of all to help ? And here
is work for them, clean, intellectual, profitable;
work that will keep them all day long in the open
air; a healthy, happy country life, humanly within
the reach of all."

" What is wanted," continued the bee-mistress,
as we went slowly down the broad main-way of the
honey-farm, " is for some great lady, rich in busi-

\i THE BEE-MASTER OP WARRlLOW

ness ideas as well as in pocket, to take up the whole
scheme, and to start a network of small bee-gardens
for women over the whole land. Very large bee-
farms are a mistake, I think, except in the most
favourable districts. Bees work only within a
radius of two or three miles at most, so that the
number of hives that can be kept profitably in a
given area has its definite limits. But there is
still plenty of room everywhere for bee-farms of
moderate size, conducted on the right principles;
and there is no reason at all why they should not
work together on the co-operative plan, sending all
their produce to some convenient centre in each
district, to be prepared and marketed for the
common good."

" But the whole outcome," she went on, " of a
scheme like this depends on the business qualities
imported into it. Here, in the heart of the Sussex
Weald, we labour together in the midst of almost
ideal surroundings, but we never lose sight of the
plain, commercial aspect of the thing. We study all
the latest writings on our subject, experiment with
all novelties, and keep ourselves well abreast of the
times in every way. Our system is to make each
hive show a clear, definite profit. The annual in-
come is not, and can never be, a very large one, but
we fare quite simply, and have sufficient for our
needs. In any case, however, we have proved here
that a few women, renting a small house and garden
out in the country, can live together comfortably
on the proceeds from their bees; and there is no
reason in the world why the idea should not be
carried out by others with equal success."
We had made the round of the whole busy,

CHLOE AMONG THE BEES 43

murmuring enclosure, and had come again to the
little door in the wall. Passing through and out
once more into the world of merely masculine
endeavour, the bee-mistress gave me a final word.
" You may think," said she, " that what I
advocate, though successful in our own single
instance, might prove impracticable on a widely ex-
tended scale. Well, do you know that last year
close upon three hundred and fifty tons of honey
were imported into Great Britain from foreign
sources,* just because our home apiculturists were
unable to cope with the national demand? And
this being so, is it too much to think that, if women
would only band themselves together and take up
bee-keeping systematically, as we have done, all or
most of that honey could be produced — of infinitely
better quality — here, on our own British soil? "
• Before the War.

CHAPTER V

A BEE-MAN OF THE 'FORTIES

HPHE old bee-garden lay on the verge of the wood
Seen from a distance it looked like a great
white china bowl brimming over with roses; but a
nearer view changed the porcelain to a snowy barrier
of hawthorn, and the roses became blossoming apple-
boughs, stretching up into the May sunshine, where
all the bees in the world seemed to have for-
gathered, filling the air with their rich wild chant.

Coming into the old garden from the glare of the
dusty road, the hives themselves were the last
thing to rivet attention. As you went up the shady
moss-grown path, perhaps the first impression you
became gratefully conscious of was the slow dim
quiet of the place — a quiet that had in it all the
essentials of silence, and yet was really made up
of a myriad blended sounds. Then the sheer
cp.rmine of the tulips, in the sunny vista beyond the
orchard, came upon you like a trumpet-note through
the shadowy aisles of the trees; and after this, in
turn, the flaming amber of the marigolds, broad
zones of forget-me-nots like strips of the blue sky
fallen, snow-drifts of arabis and starwort, purple

44

A BEE-MAN OF THE 'FORTIES 45

pansy-spangles veering to every breeze. And last
of all you became gradually aware that every bright
nook or shade-dappled corner round you had its
nestling bee-skep, half hidden in the general riot
of blossom, yet marked by the steadier, deeper
song of the homing bees.

To stand here, in the midst of the hives, of a fine
May morning, side by side with the old bee-man,
and watch with him for the earliest swarms of the
year, was an experience that took one back far
into another and a kindlier century. There were
certain hives in the garden, grey with age and
smothered in moss and lichen, that were the
traditional mother-colonies of all the rest. The old
bee-keeper treasured them as relics of his sturdy
manhood, just as he did the percussion fowling-
piece over his mantel; and pointed to one in
particular as being close on thirty years old.
Nowadays remorseless science has proved that the
individual life of the honey-bee extends to four or
five months at most; but the old bee-keeper firmly
believed that some at least of the original members
of this colony still flourished in green old age deep
in the sombre corridors of the ancient skep. Bend-
ing down, he would point out to you, among the
crowd on the alighting-board, certain bees with
polished thorax and ragged wings worn almost to
a stump. While the young worker-bees were
charging in and out of the hive at breakneck speed,
these superannuated amazons doddered about in
the sunlight, with an obvious and pathetic assump-
tion of importance. They were really the last
survivors of the bygone winter's brood. Their
task of hatching the new spring generation was

46 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

over; and now, the power of flight denied to them,
they busied themselves in the work of sentinels at
the gate, or in grooming the young bees as they
came out for their first adventure into the far
world of blossoming clover under the hill.

For modern apiculture, with its interchangeable
comb-frames and section-supers, and American
notions generally, the old bee-keeper harboured a
fine contempt. In its place he had an exhaustless
store of original bee-knowledge, gathered through-
out his sixty odd years of placid life among the
bees. His were all old-fashioned hives of straw,
hackled and potsherded just as they must have been
any time since Saxon Alfred burned the cakes.
Each bee-colony had its separate three-legged
stool, and each leg stood in an earthen pan of
water, impassable moat for ants and " wood-li's,"
and such small honey-thieves. Why the hives were
thus dotted about in such admired but inconvenient
disorder was a puzzle at first, until you learned
more of ancient bee-traditions. Wherever a swarm
settled — up in the pink-rosetted apple-boughs,
under the eaves of the old thatched cottage, or
deep in the tangle of the hawthorn hedge — there,
on the nearest open ground beneath, was its
inalienable, predetermined home. When, as some-
times happened, the swarm went straight away out
of sight over the meadows, or sailed off like a
pirouetting grey cloud over the roof of the wood,
the old bee-keeper never sought to reclaim it for
the garden.

" 'Tis gone to the shires fer change o' air," he
would say, shielding his bleak blue eyes with his
hand, as he gazed after it. " 'Twould be agen

A BEE-MAN OF THE 'FORTIES 47

natur' to hike 'em back here along. An' naught
but ill-luck an' worry wi'out end."

He never observed the skies for tokens of to-
morrow's weather, as did his neighbours of the
countryside. The bees were his weather-glass
and thermometer in one. If they hived very early
after noon, though the sun went down in clear
gold and the summer night loomed like molten
amethyst under the starshine, he would prophesy
rain before morning. And sure enough you were
wakened at dawn by a furious patter on the
window, and the booming of the south-west wind
in the pine-clad crest of the hill. But if the bees
loitered afield far into the gusty crimson gloaming,
and the loud darkness that followed seemed only to
bring added intensity to the busy labour-note
within the hives, no matter how the wind keened
or the griddle of black storm-cloud threatened, he
would go on with his evening task of watering his
garden, sure of a morrow of cloudless heat to
come.

He knew all the sources of honey for miles
around; and, by taste and smell, could decide at
once the particular crop from which each sample
had been gathered. He would discriminate between
that from white clover or sainfoin; the produce of
the yellow charlock wastes; or the orchard-honey,
wherein it seemed the fragrance of cherry-bloom
was always to be differentiated from that of apple
or damson or pear. He would tell you when good
honey had been spoilt by the grosser flavour of
sunflower or horse-chestnut; or when the detestable
honey-dew had entered into its composition; or, the
super-caps having been removed too late in the

48 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

season, the bees had got at the early ivy-blossom,
and so degraded all the batch.

Watching bees at work of a fair morning in
May, nothing excites the wonder of the casual
looker-on more than the mysterious burdens they
are for ever bringing home upon their thighs;
semi-globular packs, always gaily coloured, and
often so heavy and cumbersome that the bee can
hardly drag its weary way into the hive. This is
pollen, to be stored in the cells, and afterwards
kneaded up with honey as food for the young bees.
The old man could say at once by the colour from
which flower each load was obtained. The deep
brown-gold panniers came from the gorse-bloom;
the pure snow-white from the hawthorns; the vivid
yellow, always so big and seemingly so weighty,
had been filled in the buttercup meads. Now and
again, in early spring, a bee would come blunder-
ing home with a load of pallid sea-green hue.
This came from the gooseberry bushes. And later,
in summer, when the poppies began to throw their
scarlet shuttles in the corn, many of these airy
cargoes would be of a rich velvety black. But
there was one kind which the old bee-man had
never yet succeeded in tracing to its flowery origin.
He saw it only rarely, perhaps not a dozen times
in the season — a wonderful deep rose-crimson,
singling out its bearer, on her passage through the
throng, as with twin danger-lamps, doubly bright
in the morning glow.

Keeping watch over the comings and goings of
his bees was always his favourite pastime, year in
and year out; but it was in the later weeks of May
that his interest in them culminated. He had

A BEE-MAN OF THE 'FORTIES 49

always had swarms in May as far back as his
memory could serve him; and the oldest hive in the
garden was generally the first to swarm. As a
rule the bees gave sufficient warning of their
intended migration some hours before their actual
issue. The strenuous pell-mell business of the hive
would come to a sudden portentous halt. While a
few of the bees still darted straight off into the
sunshine on their wonted errands, or returned with
the usual motley loads upon their thighs, the rest
of the colony seemed to have abandoned work
altogether. From early morning they hung in a
great brown cluster all over the face of the hive,
and down almost to the earth beneath; a churning
mass of insect-life that grew bigger and bigger with
every moment, glistening like wet seaweed in the
morning sun. In the cluster itself there was an
uncanny silence. But out of the depths of the hive
came a low vibrating murmur, wholly distinct
from its usual note; and every now and again a
faint shrill piping sound could be heard, as the old
queen worked herself up to swarming frenzy,
vainly seeking the while to reach the royal nursery
where the rival who was to oust her from her old
dominion was even then steadily gnawing through
her constraining prison walls.

At these momentous times a quaint ceremonial
was rigidly adhered to by the old bee-master.
First he brought out a pitcher of home-brewed ale,
from which all who were to assist in the swarm-
taking were required to drink, as at a solemn rite.
The dressing of the skep was his next care. A
little of the beer was sprinkled over its interior, and
then it was carefully scoured out with a handful of
n

50 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

balm and lavender and mint. After this the skep
was covered up and set aside in the shade; and the
old bee-keeper, carrying an ancient battered copper
bowl in one gnarled hand, and a great door-key in
the other, would lead the way towards the hive,
his drab smock-frock mowing the scarlet tulip-heads
down as he went.

Sometimes the swarm went off without any
preliminary warning, just as if the skep had burst
like a bombshell, volleying its living contents into
the sky. But oftener it went through the several
stages of a regular process. After much waiting
and many false alarms, a peculiar stir would come
in the throng of bees cumbering the entrance to the
hive. Thousands rose on the wing, until the sun-
shine overhead was charged with them as with
countless fluttering atoms of silver-foil; and a wild
joyous song spread far and wide, overpowering all
other sounds in the garden. Within the hive the
rich bass note had ceased; and a hissing noise, like
a great caldron boiling over, took its place, as the
bees inside came pouring out to join the carolling
multitude above. Last of all came the queen.
Watching for her through the glittering gauzy
atmosphere of flashing wings, she was always
strangely conspicuous, with her long pointed body
of brilliant chestnut-red. She came hustling forth;
stopped for an instant to comb her antennae on the
edge of the foot-board; then soared straight up into
the blue, the whole swarm crowding deliriously in
her train.

Immediately the old bee-man commenced a weird
tom-tomming on his metal bowl. " Ringing the
hses " was an exact scienqe with him. They were

A BEE-MAN OF THE 'FORTIES 51

supposed to fly higher or lower according to the
measure of the music; and now the great door-key
beat out a slow, stately chime like a cathedral bell.
Whether this ringing of the old-time skeppists had
any real influence on the movements of a swarm
has never been absolutely determined; but there
was no doubt in this case of the bee-keeper's perfect
faith in the process, or that the bees would
commence their descent and settle, usually in one
of the apple trees, very soon after the din began.

The rapid growth of the swarm-cluster was
always one of the most bewildering things to watch.
From a little dark knot no bigger than the clenched
hand, it swelled in a moment to the size of a half-
gallon measure, growing in girth and length with
inconceivable swiftness, until the branch began to
droop under its weight. A minute more, and the
last of the flying bees had joined the cluster; the
stout apple-branch was bent almost double; and
the completed swarm hung within a few inches of
the ground, a long cigar-shaped mass gently swaying
to and fro in the flickering light and shade.

The joyous trek-song of the bees, and the clang-
ing melody of key and basin, died down together.
The old murmuring, songful quiet closed over the
garden again, as water over a cast stone. To hive
a swarm thus easily within reach was a simple
matter. Soon the old bee-man had got all snugly
inside the skep, and the hive in its self-appointed
station. And already the bees were settling down
to work; hovering merrily about it, or packed in
the fragrant darkness busy at comb-building, or
lancing off to the clover-fields, eager to begin the
task of provisioning the new home,

CHAPTER VI

HEREDITY IN THE BEE-GARDEN

TTSTE were in the great high-road of Warrilow
* bee-farm, and had stopped midway down in
the heart of the waxen city. On every hand the
hives stretched away in long trim rows, and the
hot June sunshine was alive with darting bees and
fragrant with the smell of new-made honey.

" Swarming? " said the bee-master, in answer to
a question I had put to him. " We never allow
swarming here. My bees have to work for me, and
not for themselves; so we have discarded that old-
fashioned notion long ago."

He brought his honey-barrow to a halt, and sat
down ruminatively on the handle.

" Swarming," he went on to explain, " is the
great trouble in modern bee-keeping. It is a bad
legacy left us by the old-time skeppists. With the
ancient straw hives and the old benighted methods
of working, it was all very well. When bee-
burning was the custom, and all the heaviest hives
were foredoomed to the sulphur-pit, the best bees
were those that gave the earliest and the largest
swarms. The more stocks there were in the
garden the more honey there would be for market.

HEREDITY IN THE BEE-GARDEN 53

Swarming was encouraged in every possible way,
And so, at last, the steady, stay-at-home variety of
boney-bee became exterminated, and only the
inveterate swarmers were kept to carry on the
strain."

I quoted the time-honoured maxim about a
swarm in May being worth a load of hay. The
bee-master laughed derisively.

" To the modern bee-keeper," he said, " a
swarm in May is little short of a disgrace. There
is no clearer sign of bad beemanship nowadays than
when a strong colony is allowed to weaken itself
by swarming on the eve of the great honey-flow,
just when strength and numbers are most needed.
Of course, in the old days, the maxim held true
enough. The straw skeps had room only for a
certain number of bees, and when they became too
crowded there was nothing for it but to let the
colonies split up in the natural way. But the
modern frame-hive, with its extending brood-
chamber, does away with that necessity. Instead
of the old beggarly ten or twelve thousand,, we can
now raise a population of forty or fifty thousand
bees in each hive, and so treble and quadruple the
honey-harvest."

" But," I asked him, " do not the bees go on
swarming all the same, if you let them? "

" The old instincts die hard," he said. " Some
day they will learn more scientific ways; but as
yet they have not realised the change that modern
bee-keeping has made in their condition. Of
course, swarming has its clear, definite purpose,
apart from that of relieving the congestion of the
stock. When a hive swarms, the old queen goes

54 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARR1LOW

off with the flying squadron, and a new one takes
her place at home. In this way there is always a
young and vigorous queen at the head of affairs,
and the well-being of the parent stock is assured.
But advanced bee-keepers, whose sole object is to
get a large honey yield, have long recognised that
this is a very expensive way of rejuvenating old
colonies. The parent hive will give no surplus
honey for that season; and the swarm, unless it is
a large and very early one, will do little else than
furnish its brood-nest for the coming winter. But if
swarming be prevented, and the stock reqweened
artificially every two years, we keep an immense
population always ready for the great honey-flow,
whenever it begins."

He took up the heavy barrow, laden with its pile
of super-racks, and started trundling it up the
path, talking as he went.

" If only the bees could be persuaded to leave
the queen-raising to the bee-keeper, and would
attend to nothing else but the great business of
honey-getting! But they won't — at least, not yet.
Perhaps in another hundred years or so the old
wild habits may be bred out of them; but at present
it is doubtful whether they are conscious of any
' keeping ' at all. They go the old tried paths
determinedly; and the most that we can accomplish
is to undo that part of their work which is not to
our liking, or to make a smoother road for them in
the direction they themselves have chosen."

" But you said just now," I objected, " that no
swarming was allowed among your bees. How do
you manage to prevent it? "

" It is not so much a question of prevention as of

HEREDITY IN THE BEE-GARDEN 55

cure. Each hive must be watched carefully from
the beginning. From the time the queen com-
mences to lay, in the first mild days of spring, we
keep the size of the brood nest just a little ahead of
her requirements. Every week or two I put in a
new frame of empty combs, and when she has ten
frames to work upon, and honey is getting plentiful,
I begin to put on the store-racks above, just as I
am doing now. This will generally keep them to
business; but with all the care in the world the
swarming fever will sometimes set in. And then I
always treat it in this way."

He had stopped before one of the hives, where
the bees were hanging in a glistening brown cluster
from the alighting-board; idling while their fellows
in the bee-garden seemed all possessed with a
perfect fury of work. I watched him as he lighted
the smoker, a sort of bellows with a wide tin
funnel packed with chips of dry rotten wood. He
stooped over the hive, and sent three or four dense
puffs of smoke into the entrance.

" That is called subduing the bees," he explained,
" but it really does nothing of the kind. It only
alarms them, and a frightened bee always rushes
and fills- herself with honey, to be ready for any
emergency. She can imbibe enough to keep her
for three or four days ; and once secure of immediate
want, she waits with a sort of fatalistic calm for
the development of the trouble threatening."

He halted a moment or two for this process to
complete itself, then began to open the hive. First
the roof came off; then the woollen quilts and
square of linen beneath were gradually peeled from
the tops of the comb-frames, laying bare the interior

56 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

of the hive. Out of its dim depths came up a
steady rumbling note like a train in a tunnel, but
only a few of the bees got on the wing and began
tc circle round our heads viciously. The frames
hung side by side, with a space of half an inch or so
between. The bee-master lifted them out carefully
one by one.

" Now, see here," he said, as he held up the first
frame in the sunlight, with the bees clinging in
thousands to it, " this end comb ought to have
nothing but honey in it, but you see its centre is
covered with brood-cells. The queen has caught
the bee-man napping, and has extended her nursery
to the utmost limit of the hive. She is at the end
of her tether, and has therefore decided to swarm.
Directly the bees see this they begin to prepare for
the coming loss of their queen by raising another,
and to make sure of getting one they always breed
three or four."

He took out the next comb and pointed to a round
construction, about the size and shape of an acorn,
hanging from its lower edge.

" That is a queen cell; and here, on the next
comb, are two more. One is sealed over, you see,
and may hatch out at any moment; and the others
are nearly ready for closing. They are always care-
fully guarded, or the old queen would destroy them.
And now to put an end to the swarming fit."

He took out all the combs but the four centre
ones; and, with a goose wing, gently brushed the
bees off them into the hive. The six combs were
then taken to the extricating-house hard by. The
sealed honey-cells on all of them were swiftly un-
capped, and the honey thrown out by a turn or two

HEREDITY IN THE BEE-GARDEN 57

in the centrifugal machine. Now we went back to
the hive. Right in the centre the bee-master put
a new, perfectly empty comb, and on each side of
this came the four principal brood frames with the
queen still on them. Outside of these again the
combs from which we had extracted all the honey
were brought into position. And then a rack of
new sections was placed over all, and the hive
quickly closed up. The entire process seemed the
work of only a few minutes.

" Now," said the bee-master triumphantly, as he
took up his barrow again, " we have changed the
whole aspect of affairs. The population of the
hive is as big as ever; but instead of a house of
plenty it is a house of dearth. The larder is empty,
and the only cure for impending famine is hard
work; and the bees will soon find that out and set
to again. Moreover, the queen has now plenty of
room for laying everywhere, and those exasper-
ating prison-cradles, with her future rivals hatching
in them, have been done away with. She has no
further reason for flight, and the bees, having had
all their preparations destroyed, have the best of
reasons for keeping her. Above all, there is the
new super-rack, greatly increasing the hive space,
and they will be given a second and third rack, or
even a fourth one, long before they feel the want
of it. Every motive for swarming has been
removed, and the result to the bee-master will
probably be seventy or eighty pounds of surplus
honey, instead of none at all, if the bees had been
left to their old primaeval ways."

" You must always remember, however," he
added, as a final word, " that bees do nothing

58 THE BEE-MASTER OF WAERILOW

invariably. 'Tis an old and threadbare saying
amongst bee-keepers, but there's nothing truer
under the sun. Bees have exceptions to almost
every rule. While all other creatures seem to keep
blindly to one pre-ordained way in everything they
do, you can never be certain at any time that bees
will not reverse their ordinary course to meet circum-
stances you may know nothing of. And that is all
the more reason why the bee-master himself should
allow no deviations in his own work about the
hives : his ways must be as the ways of the Medes
and Persians."

CHAPTER VII

NIGHT ON A HONEY-FARM

TPHE sweet summer dusk was over the bee-farm.
On every side, as I passed through, the star-
light showed me the crowding roofs of the city of
hives; and beyond these I could just make out the
dim outline of the extracting-house, with a cheerful
glow of lamplight streaming out from window and
door. The rumble of machinery and the voices of
the bee-master and his men grew louder as I
approached. A great business seemed to be going
forward within. In the centre of the building
stood a strange-looking engine, like a brewer's vat
on legs. It was eight or nine feet broad and some
five feet high; and a big horizontal wheel lay
within the great circle, completely filling its whole
circumference. As I entered, the wheel was going
round with a deep reverberating noise as fast as
two strong men could work the gearing; and the
bee-master stood close by, carefully timing the
operation.

"Halt!" he shouted. The great wheel-of-
fortune stopped. A long iron bar was pulled down
and the wheel rose out of the vat. Now I could see
that its whole outer periphery was covered with

59

60 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

frames of honeycomb, each in its separate gauze-
wire cage. The bee-master tugged a lever. The
cages — there must have been twenty-five or thirty
of them — turned over simultaneously like single
leaves of a book, bringing the other side of each
comb into place. The wheel dropped down once
more, and swung round again on its giddy journey.
From my place by the door I could hear the honey
driving out against the sides of the vat like heavy
rain.

" Halt!" cried the bee-master again. Once more
the big wheel rose, glistening and dripping, into the
yellow lamplight. And now a trolley was pushed up
laden with more honeycomb ready for extraction.
The wire-net cages were opened, the empty combs
taken out, and full ones deftly put in their place.
The wheel plunged down again into its mellifluous
cavern, and began its deep song once more. The
bee-master gave up his post to the foreman, and
came towards me, wiping the honey from his
hands. He was very proud of his big extractor,
and quite willing to explain the whole process.
"In the old days," he said, "the only way to
get the honey from the comb was to press it out.
You could not obtain your honey without destroying
the comb, which at this season of the year is worth
very much more than the honey itself; for if the
combs can be emptied and restored perfect
to the hive, the bees will fill them again imme-
diately, without having to waste valuable time
in the height of the honey-flow by stopping
to make new combs. And when the bees
are wax-making they are not only prevented from
gathering honey, but have to consume their own

NIGHT ON A HONEY-FARM 61

stores. While they are making one pound of comb
they will eat seventeen or eighteen pounds of honey.
So the man who hit upon the idea of drawing the
honey from the comb by centrifugal force did a
splendid thing for modern bee-farming. English
honey was nothing until the extractor came and
changed bee-keeping from a mere hobby into an
important industry. But come and see how the
thing is done from the beginning."

He led the way towards one end of the building.
Here three or four men were at work at a long
table surrounded by great stacks of honeycombs in
their oblong wooden frames. The bee-master took
up one of these. " This," he explained, " is the
bar-frame just as it comes from the hive. Ten of
them side by side exactly fill a box that goes over
the hive proper. The queen stays below in the
brood-nest, but the worker bees come to the top to
store the honey. Then, every two or three days,
when the honey-flow is at its fullest, we open the
super, take out the sealed combs, and put in combs
that have been emptied by the extractor. In a few
days these also are filled and capped by the bees,
and are replaced by more empty combs in the same
way; and so it goes on to the end of the honey-
harvest."

We stood for a minute or two watching the work at
the table. It went on at an extraordinary pace. Each
workman seized one of the frames and poised it verti-
cally over a shallow metal tray. Then, from a vessel
of steaming hot water that stood at his elbow, he
drew the long, flat-headed Bingham knife, and with
one swift slithering cut removed the whole of the
cell-cappings from the surface of the comb. At

62 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

once the knife was thrown back into its smoking
bath, and a second one taken out, with which the
other side of the comb was treated. Then the comb
was hung in the rack of the trolley, and the keen
hot blades went to work on another frame. As
each trolley was fully loaded it was whisked off to
the extracting-machine and another took its place.

" All this work," explained the bee-master, as
we passed on, " is done after dark, because in the
daytime the bees would smell the honey and would
besiege us. So we cannot begin extracting until
they are all safely hived for the night." He stopped
before a row of bulky cylinders. " These," he
said, " are the honey ripeners. Each of them holds
about twenty gallons, and all the honey is kept here
for three or four days to mature before it is ready
for market. If we were to send it out at once it
would ferment and spoil. In the top of each drum
there are fine wire strainers, and the honey must run
through these, and finally through thick flannel,
before it gets into the cylinder. Then, when it is
ripe, it is drawn off and bottled."

One of the big cylinders was being tapped at the
moment. A workman came up with a kind of
gardener's water-tank on wheels. The valve of the
honey-vat was opened, and the rich fluid came
gushing out like liquid amber. " This is all white-
clover honey," said the bee-master, tasting it
critically. " The next vat there ought to be pure
sainfoin. Sometimes the honey has a distinct almond
flavour; that is when hawthorn is abundant. Honey
varies as much as wine. It is good or bad accord-
ing to the soil and the season. Where the horse-
chestnut is plentiful the honey has generally a rank

NIGHT ON A HONEY-FARM 63

taste. But this is a sheep-farmers' country, where
they grow thousands of acres of rape and lucerne
and clover for sheep-feed; and nothing could be
better for the bees."

By this time the gardener's barrow was full to
the brim. We followed it as it was trundled
heavily away to another part of the building. Here
a little company of women were busy filling the
neat glass jars, with their bright screw-covers of
tin; pasting on the label of the big London stores,
whither most of the honey was sent; and packing
the jars into their travelling-cases ready for the
railway-van in the morning. The whole place
reeked with the smell of new honey and the faint,
indescribable odour of the hives. As we passed out
of the busy scene of the extracting-house into the
moist dark night again, this peculiar fragrance struck
upon us overpoweringly. The slow wind was
setting our way, and the pungent odour from the
hives came up on it with a solid, almost stifling,
effect.

" They are fanning hard to-night," said the
bee-master, as we stopped halfway down the garden.
" Listen to the noise they're making!"

The moon was just tilting over the tree-tops. In
its dim light the place looked double its actual size.
We seemed to stand in the midst of a great town of
bee-dwellings, stretching vaguely away into the
darkness. And from every hive there rose the
clear deep murmur of the ventilating bees.

The bee-master lighted his lantern, and held it
down close to the entrance of the nearest hive.

" Look how they form up in rows, one behind
the other, with their heads to the hive; and a,U

64 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

fanning with their wings ! They are drawing the
hot air out. Inside there is another regiment of
them, but those are facing the opposite way, and
drawing the cool air in. And so they keep the hive
always at the right temperature for honey-making,
and for hatching out the young bees."

" Who was it," he asked ruminatively, as the
gate of the bee-farm closed at last behind us, and
we were walking homeward through the glimmer-
ing dusk of the lane — " who was it first spoke of the
' busy bee ' ? Busy ! 'Tis not the word for it I
Why, from the moment she is born to the day she
dies the bee never rests nor sleeps ! It is hard
work night and day, from the cradle-cell to the
grave; and in the honey-season she dies of it after
a month or so. It is only the drone that rests. He
is very like some humans I know of his own sex;
he lives an idle life, and leaves the work to the
womenkind. But the drone has to pay for it in
the end, for the drudging woman-bee revolts sooner
or later. And then she kills him. In bee-life the
drone always dies a violent death; but in human
life — well, it seems to me a little bee-justice wouldn't
be amiss with some of them."

CHAPTER VIII

IN A BEE-CAMP

" ,r PIS a good thing — life; but ye never know how
good, really, till you've followed the bees to
the heather."

It was an old saying of the bee-master's, and it
came again slowly from his lips now, as he knelt
by the camp-fire, watching the caress of the flames
round the bubbling pot. We were in the heart of
the Sussex moorland, miles away from the nearest
village, still farther from the great bee-farm where,
at other times, the old man drove his thriving
trade. But the bees were here — a million of them
perhaps — all singing their loudest in the blossom-
ing heather that stretched away on every side
to the far horizon, under the sweltering August
sun.

Getting the bees to the moors was always the
chief event of the year down at the honey-farm.
For days the waggons stood by the laneside,, all
ready to be loaded up with the best and most
populous hives; but the exact moment of departure
depended on one very uncertain factor. The white-
clover crop was almost at an end. Every day saw
the acreage of sainfoin narrowing, as the sheep-
E 65

66 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRTLOW

folds closed in upon it, leaving nothing but bare
yellow waste, where had been a rolling sea of
crimson blossom. But the charlock lay on every
hillside like cloth-of-gold. Until harvest was done
the fallows were safe from the ploughshare, and
what proved little else than a troublesome weed to
the farmer was like golden guineas growing to
every keeper of bees.

But at last the new moon brought a sharp chilly
night with it, and the long-awaited signal was given.
Coming down with the first grey glint of morning
from the little room under the thatch, I found the
bee-garden in a swither of commotion. A faint
smell of carbolic was on the air, and the shadowy
figures of the bee-master and his men were hurrying
from hive to hive, taking off the super-racks that
stood on many three and four stories high. The
honey-barrows went to and fro groaning under
their burdens; and the earliest bees, roused from
their rest by this unwonted turmoil, filled the grey
dusk with their high timorous note.

The bee-master came over to me in his white
overalls, a weird apparition in the half-darkness.

" 'Tis the honey-dew," he said, out of breath, as
he passed by. " The first cold night of summer
brings it out thick on every oak-leaf for miles
around; and if we don't get the supers off before
the bees can gather it, the honey will be blackened
and spoiled for market."

He carried a curious bundle with him, an armful
of fluttering pieces of calico, and I followed him
as he went to work on a fresh row of hives. From
each bee-dwelling the roof was thrown off, the
inner CQverings removed, and one qf the squares

IN A BEE-CAMP 67

of cloth— damped with the carbolic solution— quickly-
drawn over the topmost rack. A sudden fearsome
buzzing uprose within, and then a sudden silence.
There is nothing in the world a bee dreads more
than the smell of carbolic acid. In a few seconds
the super-racks were deserted, the bees crowding
down into the lowest depths of the hives. The
creaking barrows went down the long row in the
track of the master, taking up the heavy racks as
they passed. Before the sun was well up over the
hill-brow the last load had been safely gathered in,
and the chosen hives were being piled into the
waggons, ready for the long day's journey to the
moors.

All this was but a week ago; yet it might have
been a week of years, so completely had these rose-
red highland solitudes accepted our invasion, and
absorbed us into their daily round of sun and song.
Here, in a green hollow of velvet turf, right in the
heart of the wilderness, the camp had been pitched —
the white bell-tents with their skirts drawn up,
showing the spindle-legged field-bedsteads within;
the filling-house, made of lath and gauze, where the
racks could be emptied and recharged with the little
white wood section-boxes, safe from marauding
bees; the honey-store, with its bee-proof crates
steadily mounting one upon the other, laden with
rich brown heather-honey — the finest sweet-food in
the world. And round the camp, in a vast spread-
ing circle, stood the hives — a hundred or more —
knee-deep in the rosy thicket, each facing outward,
and each a whirling vortex of life from early dawn
to the last amber gleam of sunset abiding under the
flinching silver of the stars,

68 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

The camp-fire crackled and hissed, and the pot
sent forth a savoury steam into the morning air.
From the heather the deep chant of busy thousands
came over on the wings of the breeze, bringing
with it the very spirit of serene content. The bee-
master rose and stirred the pot ruminatively.

" B'iled rabbit!" said he, looking up, with the
light of old memories coming in his gnarled brown
face. " And forty years ago, when I first came to
the heather, it used to be b'iled rabbit too. We
could set a snare in those days as well as now.
But 'twas only a few hives then, a dozen or so of
old straw skeps on a barrow, and naught but the
starry night for a roof-tree, or a sack or two to
keep off the rain. None of your women's luxuries
in those times! "

He looked round rather disparagingly at his own
tent, with its plain truckle-bed, and tin wash-bowl,
and other deplorable signs of effeminate self-
indulgence.

" But there was one thing," he went on, "one
thing we used to bring to the moors that never
comes now. And that was the basket of sulphur-
rag. When the honey-flow is done, and the waggons
come to fetch us home again, all the hives will go
back to their places in the garden none the worse
for their trip. But in the old days of bee-burning
never a bee of all the lot returned from the moors.
Come a little way into the long grass yonder, and
I'll show ye the way of it."

With a stick he threshed about in the dry bents,
and soon lay bare a row of circular cavities in the
ground. They were almost choked up with moss
and the rank undergrowth of many years; but

IN A BEE-CAMP 69

originally they must have been each about ten
inches broad by as many deep.

" These," said the bee-master, with a shamefaced
air of confession, " were the sulphur-pits. I dug
them the first year I ever brought hives to the
heather; and here, for twenty seasons or more,
some of the finest and strongest stocks in Sussex
were regularly done to death. Tis a drab tale to
tell, but we knew no better then. To get the honey
away from the bees looked well-nigh impossible
with thousands of them clinging all over the combs.
And it never occurred to any of us to try the other
way, and get the bees to leave the honey. Yet bee-
driving, 'tis the simplest thing in the world, as
every village lad knows to-day."

We strolled out amongst the hives, and the bee-
master began his leisurely morning round of
inspection. In the bee-camp, life and work alike
took their time from the slow march of the summer
sun, deliberate, imperturbable, across the pathless
heaven. The bees alone keep up the heat and
burden of the day. While they were charging in
and out of the hives, possessed with a perfect fury
of labour, the long hours of sunshine went by for
us in immemorial calm. Like the steady rise and
fall of a windless tide, darkness and day succeeded
one another; and the morning splash in the
dew-pond on the top of the hill, and the song by the
camp-fire at night, seemed divided only by a dim
formless span too uneventful and happy to be called
by the old portentous name of Time.

And yet every moment had its business, not to be
delayed beyond its imminent season. Down in the
bee-farm the work of honey-harvesting always

?o THE BEE-MASTER OE WARRILOW

carried with it a certain stress and bustle. The
great centrifugal extractor would be roaring half
the night through, emptying the super-combs, which
were to be put back into the hives on the morrow,
and refilled by the bees. But here, on the moors,
modern bee-science is powerless to hurry the work
of the sunshine. The thick heather-honey defies
the extracting-machine, and cannot be separated
without destroying the comb. Moorland honey —
except where the wild sage is plentiful enough to
thin down the heather sweets — must be left in the
virgin comb; and the bee-man can do little more
than look on as vigilantly as may be at the work of
his singing battalions, and keep the storage-space
of the hives always well in advance of their need.

Yet there is one danger — contingent at all
seasons of bee-life, but doubly to be guarded
against during the critical time of the honey-flow.

As we loitered round the great circle, the old bee-
keeper halted in the rear of every hive to watch the
contending streams of workers, the one rippling
out into the blue air and sunshine, the other setting
more steadily homeward, each bee weighed down
with her load of nectar and pale grey pollen, as she
scrambled desperately through the opposing crowd
and vanished into the seething darkness within.
As we passed each hive, the old bee-man carefully
noted its strength and spirit, comparing it with the
condition of its neighbours on either hand. At
last he stopped by one of the largest hives, and
pointed to it significantly.

"Can ye see aught amiss?" he asked, hastily
rolling his shirt-sleeves up to the armpit.

I looked, but could detect nothing wrong. The

IN A BEE-CAMP ft

multitude round the entrance to this hive seemed
larger and busier than with any other, and the note
within as deeply resonant.

"Ay! they're erpulous enough," said the bee-
master, as he lighted his tin-nozzled bellows-smoker
and coaxed it into full blast. " But hark to the din!
Tis not work this time; 'tis mortal fear of some-
thing. Flying strong? Ah, but only a yard or
two up, and back again. There's trouble at hand,
and they've only just found it out. The matter is,
they have lost their queen."

He was hurriedly removing the different parts of
the hive as he spoke. A few quick puffs from the
smoker were all that was needed at such a time.
With no thought but for the tragedy that had come
upon them, the bees were rushing madly to and fro
in the hive, not paying the slightest attention to the
fact that their house was falling asunder piecemeal
and the sudden sunshine riddling it through and
through, where had been nothing but Cimmerian
darkness before. Under the steady slow hand of
the master, the teeming section-racks came off one
by one, until the lowest chamber — the nursery of
the hive — was reached, and a note like imprisoned
thunder in miniature burst out upon us.

The old bee-keeper lifted out the brood-frames,
and subjected each to a lynx-eyed scrutiny. At last
he dived his bare hand down into the thick of the
bees, and brought up something to show me. It
was the dead queen; twice the size of all the rest,
with short oval wings and a shining red-gold body,
strangely conspicuous among the score or so of
dun-coloured workers which still crowded round her
on the palm of his hand.

y2 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

" In the old days," said the bee-master, " before
the movable-comb hive was invented, if the queen
died like this, it would throw the whole colony out
of gear for the rest of the season. Three weeks
must elapse before a new queen could be hatched
and got ready for work; and then the honey-harvest
would be over. But see how precious time can be
saved under the modern system."

He led the way to a hive which stood some dis-
tance apart from the rest. It was much smaller
than the others, and consisted merely of a row of
little boxes, each with its separate entrance, but all
under one common roof. The old bee-man opened
one of the compartments, and lifted out its single
comb-frame, on which were clustered only a few
hundred bees. Searching among these with a
wary forefinger, at last he seized one by the wings
and held it up to view.

" This is a spare queen," said he. " 'Tis always
wise to bring a few to the heather, against any mis-
chance. And now we'll give her to the motherless
bees; and in an hour or two the stock will be at
work again as busily as ever."

CHAPTER IX

THE BEE-HUNTERS

" TN that bit of forest," said the bee-master, indic-
ating a long stretch of neighbouring woodland
with one comprehensive sweep of his thumb, " there
are tons of honey waiting for any man who knows
how to find it."

I had met and stopped the old bee-keeper and his
men, bent on what seemed a rather singular under-
taking. They carried none of the usual implements
of their craft, but were laden up with the
paraphernalia of woodmen — rip-saws and hatchets
and climbing-irons, and a mysterious box or
two, the use of which I could not even guess
at. But the bee-master soon made his errand
plain.

" Tons of honey," he went on. " And we are
going to look for some of it. There have been
wild bees, I suppose, in the forest country from the
beginning of things. Then see how the land lies.
There are villages all round, and for ages past
swarms have continually got away from the bee-
gardens, and hived themselves in the hollow trunks

73

74 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

of the trees. Then every year these stray colonies
have sent out their own swarms again, until to-day
the woods are full of bees, wild as wolves and often
as savage, guarding stores that have been accumu-
lating perhaps for years and years."

He shifted his heavy kit from one shoulder to the
other. Overhead the sun burned in a cloudless
August sky, and the willow-herb by the roadside
was full of singing bees and the nicker of white
butterflies. In the hedgerows there were more bees
plundering the blackberry blossom, or sounding
their vagrant note in the white convolvulus-bells
which hung in bridal wreaths at every turn of the
way. Beyond the hedgerow the yellow cornlands
flowed away over hill and dale under the torrid
light; and each scarlet poppy that hid in the rustling
gold-brown wheat had its winged musician chanting
at its portal. As I turned and went along with the
expedition, the bee-master gave me more details of
the coming enterprise.

" Mind you," he said, " this is not good beeman-
ship as the moderns understand it. It is nothing
but bee-murder, of the old-fashioned kind. But
even if the bees could be easily taken alive, we
should not want them in the apiary. Blood counts
in bee-life, as in everything else; and these
forest-bees have been too long under the old natural
conditions to be of any use among the domestic
strain. However, the honey is worth the getting,
and if we can land only one big stock or two it will
be a profitable day's work."

We had left the hot, dusty lane, and taken to
the field-path leading up through a sea of white
clover to the woods above.

THE BEE-HUNTERS 75

" This is the after-crop," said the bee-master, as
he strode on ahead with his jingling burden. " The
second cut of Dutch clover always gives the most
honey. Listen to the bees everywhere — it is just
like the roar of London heard from the top of St
Paul's ! And most of it here is going into the
woods, more's the pity. Well, well; we must try
to get some of it back to-day."

Between the verge of the clover-field and the
shadowy depths of the forest ran a broad green
waggon-way; and here we came to a halt. In the
field we had lately traversed the deep note of the
bees had sounded mainly underfoot; but now it was
all above us, as the honeymakers sped to and fro
between the sunlit plane of blossom and their hidden
storehouses in the wood. The upper air was full
of their music ; but, straining the sight to its utmost,
not a bee. could be seen.

" And you will never see them," said the bee-
master, watching me as he unpacked his kit.
" They fly too fast and too high. And if you can't
see them go by out here in the broad sunshine, how
will you track them to their lair through the dim
light under the trees? And yet," he went on,
" that is the only way to do it. It is useless to
search the wood for their nests; you might travel
the whole day through and find nothing. The
only plan is to follow the laden bees returning
to the hive. And now watch how we do that in
Sussex."

From one of the boxes he produced a contrivance
like a flat tin saucer mounted on top of a pointed
stick. He stuck this in the ground near the edge
of the clover-field so that the saucer stood on a

;6 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

level with the highest blossoms. Now he took a
small bottle of honey from his pocket, emptied it
into the tin receptacle, and beckoned me to come
near. Already three or four bees had discovered
this unawaited feast and settled on it; a minute
more and the saucer was black with crowding bees.
Now the bee-master took a wire-gauze cover and
softly inverted it over the saucer. Then, plucking
his ingenious trap up by the roots, he set off
towards the forest with his prisoners, followed by
his men.

" These," said he, " are our guides to the secret
treasure-chamber. Without them we might look
for a week and never find it. But now it is all
plain sailing, as you'll see."

He pulled up on the edge of the wood. By this
time every bee in the trap had forsaken the honey,
and was clambering about in the top of the dome-
shaped lid, eager for flight.

" They are all full of honey," said the bee-master,
" and the first thing a fully-laden bee thinks of is
home. And now we will set the first one on the
wing."

He opened a small valve in the trap-cover, and
allowed one of the bees to escape. She rose into
the air, made a short circle, then sped away into the
gloom of the wood. In a moment she was lost to
sight, but the main direction of her course was clear;
and we all followed helter-skelter until our leader
called another halt.

" Now watch this one," he said, pressing the
valve again.

This time the guide rose high into the dim
air, and was at once lost to my view. But

THE BEE-HUNTERS 77

the keen eyes of the old bee-man had challenged
her.

' There she goes ! " he said, pointing down a
long shadowy glade somewhat to his left. " Watch
that bit of sunlight away yonder! "

I followed this indication. Through the dense
wood-canopy a hundred feet away the sun had thrust
one long golden tentacle; and I saw a tiny spark of
light flash through into the gloom beyond. We all
stampeded after it.

Another and another of the guides was set free,
each one taking us deeper into the heart of the
forest, until at last the bee-master suddenly stopped
and held up his hand.

" Listen! " he said under his breath.

Above the rustling of the leaves, above the quiet
stir of the undergrowth and the crooning of the
stock-doves, a shrill insistent note came over to us
on the gentle wind. The bee-man led the way
silently into the darkest depths of the wood. Halt-
ing, listening, going swiftly forward in turn, at last
he stopped at the foot of an old decayed elm-stump.
The shrill note we had heard was much louder now,
and right overhead. Following his pointing fore-
finger, I saw a dark cleft in the old trunk about
twenty feet above; and round this a cloud of bees
was circling, filling the air with their rich deep
labour-song. At the same instant, with a note like
the twang of a harp-string, a bee came at me and
fastened a red-hot fish-hook into my cheek. The
old bee-keeper laughed.

" Get this on as soon as you can," he said, pro-
ducing a pocketful of bee-veils, and handing me
qne from the bunch. " These are wild bees, thirty

78 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

thousand of them, maybe; and we shall need
all our armour to-day. Only wait till they find
us out ! But now rub your hands all over with
this."

Every man scrambled into his veil, and anointed
his hands with the oil of wintergreen — the one
abiding terror of vindictive bees. And then the
real business of the day commenced.

The bee-master had strapped on his climbing-
irons. Now he struck his way slowly up the tree,
tapping the wood with the butt-end of a hatchet
inch by inch as he went. At last he found what he
wanted. The trunk rang hollow about a dozen feet
from the ground. Immediately he began to cut it
away. The noise of the hatchet woke all the echoes
of the forest. The chips came fluttering to the
earth. The rich murmur overhead changed to an
angry buzzing. In a moment the bees were on the
worker in a vortex of humming fury, covering his
veil, his clothes, his hands. But he worked on
unconcernedly until he had driven a large hole
through the crust of the tree and laid bare the
glistening honeycomb within. Now I saw him take
from a sling-bag at his side handful after handful
of some yellow substance and heap it into the
cavity he had made. Then he struck a match,
lighted the stuff, and came sliding swiftly to earth
again. We all drew off and waited.

"That," explained the bee-master, as he leaned
on his woodman's axe out of breath, " is cotton-
waste, soaked in creosote, and then smothered in
powdered brimstone. See! it is burning famously.
The fumes will soon fill the hollow of the tree and
settle the whole company. Then we shall cut away

THE BEE-HUNTERS 79

enough of the rotten wood above to get all the best
of the combs out; there are eighty pounds of good
honey up there, or I'm no bee-man. And then it's
back to the clover-field for more guide-bees, and
away on a new scent."

CHAPTER X

THE PHYSICIAN IN THE HIVE

TT was a strange procession coming up the red-
tiled path of the bee garden. The bee-master
led the way in his Sunday clothes, followed by a
gorgeous footman, powdered and cockaded, who
carried an armful of wraps and cushions. Behind
him walked two more, supporting between them a
kind of carrying-chair, in which sat a florid old
gentleman in a Scotch plaid shawl; and behind these
again strode a silk-hatted, black-frocked man
carefully regulating the progress of the cavalcade.
Through the rain of autumn leaves, on the brisk
October morning, I could see, afar off, a carriage
waiting by the lane-side; a big old-fashioned family
vehicle, with cockaded servants, a pair of champing
greys, and a glitter of gold and scarlet on the panel,
where the sunbeams struck on an elaborate coat-of-
arms.

The whole procession made for the extracting-
house, and all work stopped at its approach. The
great centrifugal machine ceased its humming. The
doors of the packing-room were closed, shutting
qfi the din of saw and hammer. Over the stone

8a

THE PHYSICIAN IN THE HIVE 81

floor in front of the furnace— where a big caldron
of metheglin was simmering— a carpet was hastily
unrolled, and a comfortable couch brought out and
set close to the cheery blaze.

And now the strangest part of the proceedings
commenced. The old gentleman was brought in,
partially disrobed, and transferred to the couch by
the fireside. He seemed in great trepidation about
something. He kept his gold eyeglasses turned on
the bee-master, watching him with a sort of terrified
wonder, as the old bee-man produced a mysterious
box, with a lid of perforated zinc, and laid it on the
table close by. From my corner the whole scene
was strongly reminiscent of the ogre's kitchen in
the fairy-tale; and the muffled sounds from the pack-
ing-room might have been the voice of the ogre
himself, complaining at the lateness of his dinner.

Now, at a word from the black-coated man, the
bee-master opened his box. A loud angry buzzing
uprose, and about a dozen bees escaped into the air,
and flew straight for the window-glass. The bee-
master followed them, took one carefully by the
wings, and brought it over to the old gentleman.
His apprehensions visibly redoubled. The doctor
seized him in an iron, professional grip.

" Just here, I think. Close under the shoulder-
blade. Now, your lordship ..."

Viciously the infuriated bee struck home. For
eight or ten seconds she worked her wicked will on
the patient. Then, turning round and round, she
at last drew out her sting, and darted back to the
window.

But the bee-master was ready with another of his
living stilettos. Half a dozen times the operation
F

82 THE BEE-MASTER OF WSRRILOW

was repeated on various parts of the suffering
patient's body. Then the old gentleman — who, by
this time, had passed from whimpering through the
various stages of growing indignation to sheer
undisguised profanity — was restored to his apparel.
The procession was re-formed, and the bee-master
conducted it to the waiting carriage, with the same
ceremony as before.

As we stood looking after the retreating vehicle,
the old bee-man entered into explanations.

" That," said he, " is Lord H , and he has

been a martyr to rheumatism these ten years back.
I could have cured him long ago if he had only
come to me before, as I have done many a poor
soul in these parts; but he, and those like him, are
the last to hear of the physician in the hive. He
will begin to get better now, as you will see. He
is to be brought here every fortnight; but in a
month or two he will not need the chair. And
before the winter is out he will walk again as well
as the best of us."

We went slowly back through the bee-farm.
The working-song of the bees seemed as loud as
ever in the keen October sunshine. But the steady
deep note of summer was gone; and the peculiar
bee-voice of autumn — shrill, anxious, almost
vindictive — rang out on every side.

" Of course," continued the bee-master, " there
is nothing new in this treatment of rheumatism by
bee-stings. It is literally as old as the hills. Every
bee-keeper for the last two thousand years has
known of it. But it is as much as a preventive as
a cure that the acid in a bee's sting is valuable.
The rarest thing in the world is to find a bee-keeper

THE PHYSICIAN IN THE HIVE 83

suffering from rheumatism. And if every one kept
bees, and got stung occasionally, the doctors would
soon have one ailment the less to trouble about."

" But," he went on, " there is something much
pleasanter and more valuable to humanity, ill or
well, to be got from the hives. And that is the
honey itself. Honey is good for old and young.
If mothers were wise they would never give
their children any other sweet food. Pure
ripe honey is sugar with the most difficult and
most important part of digestion already accom-
plished by the bees. Moreover, it is a safe and
very gentle laxative. And probably, before each
comb-cell is sealed up, the bee injects a drop of acid
from her sting. Anyway, honey has a distinct
aseptic property. That is why it is so good for sore
throats or chafed skins."

We had got back to the extracting house, where
the great caldron of metheglin was still bubbling
over the fire. The old bee-keeper relieved himself
of his stiff Sunday coat, donned his white linen over-
alls, and fell to skimming the pot.

" There is another use," said he, after a
ruminative pause, " to which honey might be put,
if only doctors could be induced to seek curative
power in ancient homely things, as they do with the
latest new poisons from Germany. That is in the
treatment of obesity. Fat people, who are ordered
to give up sugar, ought to use honey instead. In
my time I have persuaded many a one to try it, and
the result has always been the same— a steady
reduction in weight, and better health all round.
Then, again, dyspeptic folk would find most of their
troubles vanish if they substituted the already half-

84 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

digested honey wherever ordinary sugar forms part
of their diet. And did you ever try honey to
sweeten tea or coffee? Of course, it must be pure,
and without any strongly-marked flavour; but no
one would ever return to sugar if once good honey
had been tried in this way, or in any kind of cookery
where sugar is used."

The bee-master ran his fingers through his hair,
of which he had a magnificent iron-grey crop.
The fingers were undeniably sticky; but it was an
old habit of his, when in thoughtful mood, and the
action seemed to remind him of something. His
eyes twinkled merrily.

" Now," said he, " you are a writer for the
papers, and you may therefore want to go into the
hair-restoring business some day. Well, here is a
recipe for you. It is nothing but honey and water,
in equal parts, but it is highly recommended by all
the ancient writers on beemanship. Have I tried
it? Well, no; at least, not intentionally. But in
extracting honey it gets into most places, the hair
not excepted. At any rate, honey as a hair-restorer
was one of the most famous nostrums of the Middle
Ages, and may return to popular favour even now.
However, here is something there can be no
question about."

He went to a cupboard, and brought out a jar
full of a viscid yellow substance.

"This," he said, "is an embrocation, and it is
the finest thing I know for sprains and bruises. It
is made of the wax from old combs, dissolved in
turpentine, and if we got nothing else from the
hives bee-keeping would yet be justified as a
humanitarian calling. Its virtues may be in the

The physician in the hive 8s

wax, or they may be due to the turpentine, but
probably they lie in another direction altogether.
Bees collect a peculiar resinous matter from pine
trees and elsewhere, with which they varnish the
whole surface of their combs, and this may be the
real curative element in the stuff."

Now, with a glance at the clock, the bee-master
went to the open door and hailed his foreman in
from his work about the garden. Between them
they lifted away the heavy caldron from the fire,
and tilted its steaming contents into a barrel close
at hand. The whole building filled at once with a
sweet penetrating odour, which might well have
been the concentrated fragrance of every summer
flower on the countryside.

-" But of all the good things given us by the wise
physician of the hive," quoth the old bee-keeper,
enthusiastically, " there is nothing so good as well-
brewed metheglin. This is just as I have made it
for forty years, and as my father made it long
before that. Between us we have been brewing
mead for more than a century. It is almost a lost
art now; but here in Sussex there are still a few
antiquated folk who make it, and some, even, who
remember the old methers — the ancient cups it used
to be quaffed from. As an everyday drink for
working-men, wholesome, nourishing, cheering,
there is nothing like it in or out of the Empire.

CHAPTER XI

WINTER WORK ON THE BEE-FARM

'"FHE light snow covered the path through the
bee-farm, and whitened the roof of every hive.
In the red winter twilight it looked more like a
human city than ever, with its long double rows of
miniature houses stretching away into the dusk on
either hand, and its broad central thoroughfare,
where the larger hives crowded shoulder to
shoulder, casting their black shadows over the
glimmering snow.

The bee-master led the way towards the extract-
ing-house at the end of the garden, as full of his
work, seemingly, as ever he had been in the press
of summer days. There was noise enough going
on in the long lighted building ahead of us, but I
missed the droning song of the great extractor
itself.

" No; we have done with honey work for this
year," said the old bee-man. " It is all bottled and
cased long ago, and most of it gone to London.
But there's work enough still, as you'll see. The
bees get their long rest in the winter; but, on a big
honey-farm, the humans must work all the year
round."

86

*5 BBSfe* ^^

^r\i

WINTER WORK ON THE BEE-FARM 87

As we drew into the zone of light from the
windows, many sounds that from afar had seemed
incongruous enough on the silent, frost-bound
evening began to explain themselves. The whole
building was full of busy life. A furnace roared
under a great caldron of smoking syrup, which the
foreman was vigorously stirring. In the far
corner an oil engine clanked and spluttered. A
circular saw was screaming through a baulk of
timber, slicing it up into thin planks as a man would
turn over the leaves of a book. Planing machines
and hammers and handsaws innumerable added
their voices to the general chorus; and out of the
shining steel jaws of an implement that looked half
printing-press and half clothes-wringer there flowed
sheet after sheet of some glistening golden material,
the use of which I could only dimly guess at.

But I had time only for one swift glance at this
mysterious monster. The bee-master gripped me
by the arm and drew me towards the furnace.

" This is bee-candy," he explained, " winter food
for the hives. We make a lot of it and send it all
over the country. But it's ticklish work. When the
syrup comes to the galloping-point it must boil for
one minute, no more and no less. If we boil it too
little it won't set, and if too much it goes hard, and
the bees can't take it."

He took up his station now, watch in hand, close
to the man who was stirring, while two or three
others looked anxiously on.

"Time! " shouted the bee-master.

The great caldron swung off the stove on its sus-
pending chain. Near the fire stood a water tank,
and into this the big vessel of boiling syrup was

88 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

suddenly doused right up to the brim, the stirrer
labouring all the time at the seething grey mass
more furiously than ever.

" The quicker we can cool it the better it is,"
explained the old bee-keeper, through the steam.
He was peering into the caldron as he spoke, watch-
ing the syrup change from dark clear grey to a
dirty white, like half-thawed snow. Now he gave a
sudden signal. A strong rod was instantly passed
through the handles of the caldron. The vessel
was whisked out of its icy bath and borne rapidly
away. Following hard upon its heels, we saw the
bearers halt near some long, low trestle-tables,
where hundreds of little wooden boxes were ranged
side by side. Into these the thick, sludgy syrup
was poured as rapidly as possible, until all were
filled.

" Each box," said the bee-master, as we watched
the candy gradually setting snow-white in its
wooden frames, " each box holds about a pound.
The box is put into the hive upside-down on the top
of the comb-frames, just over the cluster of bees;
and the bottom is glazed because then you can see
when the candy is exhausted, and the time has come
to put on another case. What is it made of?
Well, every maker has his own private formula,
and mine is a secret like the rest. But it is sugar,
mostly — cane-sugar. Beet-sugar will not do; it is
injurious to the bees.

" But candy-making," he went on, as we moved
slowly through the populous building, "is by no
means the only winter work on a bee-farm. There
are the hives to make for next season; all those we
shall need for ourselves, and hundreds more we

WINTER WORK ON THE BEE-EARM 89

sell in the spring, either empty or stocked with
bees. Then here is the foundation mill."

^ He turned to the contrivance I had noticed on
my entry. The thin amber sheets of material, like
crinkled glass, were still flowing out between the
rollers. He took a sheet of it as it fell, and held it
up to the light. A fine hexagonal pattern covered
it completely from edge to edge.

" This," he said, " we call super- foundation. It
is pure refined wax, rolled into sheets as thin as
paper, and milled on both sides with the shapes of
the cells. All combs now are built by the bees on
this artificial foundation; and there is enough wax
here, thin as it is, to make the entire honeycomb.
The bees add nothing to it, but simply knead it and
draw it out into a comb two inches wide; and so all
the time needed for wax-making by the bees is
saved just when time is most precious — during the
short season of the honey-flow."

He took down a sheet from another pile close at
hand.

" All that thin foundation," he explained, " is for
section-honey, and will be eaten. But this you
could not eat. This is brood-foundation, made
extra strong to bear the great heat of the lower
hive. It is put into the brood-nest, and the cells
reared on it are the cradles for the young bees.
See how dense and brown it is, and how thick; it
is six or seven times as heavy as the other. But
it is all pure wax, though not so refined, and is
made in the same way, serving the same useful,
time-saving purpose."

We moved on towards the store-roons, out of the
clatter of the machinery.

$o THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

" It was a great day," he said, reflectively, " a
great day for bee-keeping when foundation was
invented. The bee-man who lets his hives work on
the old obsolete natural system nowadays makes a
hopeless handicap of things. Yet the saving of
time and bee-labour is not the only, and is hardly
the most important, outcome of the use of founda-
tion. It has done a great deal more than that, for
it has solved the very weighty problem of how to
keep the number of drones in a hive within
reasonable limits."

He opened the door of a small side-room. From
ceiling to floor the walls were covered with deep
racks loaded with frames of empty comb, all
ready for next season. Taking down a couple
of the frames, he brought them out into the
light.

" These will explain to you what I mean," said
he. "■ This first one is a natural-built comb, made
without the milled foundation. The centre and
upper part, you see, is covered on both sides with
the small cells of the worker-brood. But all the
rest of the frame is filled with larger cells, and in
these only drones are bred. Bees, if left to them-
selves, will always rear a great many more drones
than are needed; and as the drones gather no stores
but only consume them in large quantities, a super-
abundance of the male-bees in a hive must mean a
diminished honey-yield. But the use of foundation
has changed all that. Now look at this other
frame. By filling all brood-frames with worker-
foundation, as has been done here, we compel the
bees to make only small cells, in which the rearing
of drones is almost impossible; and so we keep

WINTER WORK ON THE BEE-FARM gt

the whole brood-space in the hive available for the
generation of the working bee alone."

" But," I asked him, " are not drones absolutely
necessary in a hive? The population cannot
increase without the male bees."

" Good drones are just as important in a bee-
garden as high-mettled, prolific queens," he said;
" and drone-breeding on a small scale must form
part of the work on every modern Bee-farm of any
size. But my own practice is to confine the drones
to two or three hives only. These are stationed in
different parts of the farm. They are always
selected stocks of the finest and most vigorous
strain, and in them I encourage drone-breeding in
every possible way. But the male bees in all
honey-producing hives are limited to a few hundreds
at most."

Coming out into the darkness from the brilliantly-
lighted building, we had gone some way on our
homeward road through the crowded bee-farm
before we marked the change that had come over
the sky. Heavy vaporous clouds were slowly
driving up from the west and blotting the stars out
one by one. All their frosty sparkle was gone, and
the night air had no longer the keen tooth of winter
in it. The bee-master held up his hand.

" Listenl " he said. " Don't you hear any-
thing? "

I strained my ears to their utmost pitch. A dog
barked forlornly in the distant village. Some night-
bird went past overhead with a faint jangling cry.
But the slumbering bee-city around us was as silent
and still as death.

'-' When you have lived among bees for forty

gz THE BEE-MASTER OP WARRlLOW

years," said the bee-master, plodding on again,
" you may get ears as long as mine. Just reckon it
out. The wind has changed; that curlew knows the
warm weather is coming; but the bees, huddled to-
gether in the midst of a double-walled hive, found
it out long ago. Now, there are between three
and four hundred hives here. At a very modest
computation, there must be as many bees crowded
together on these few acres of land as there are
people in the whole of London and Brighton com-
bined. And they are all awake, and talking, and
telling each other that the cold spell is past. That
is what I can hear now, and shall hear — down in
the house yonder — all night long."

CHAPTER XII

THE QUEEN BEE: IN ROMANCE
AND REALITY

OUEENS?" said the Bee-Master of Warrilow,
as he filled his pipe with the blackest and
strongest tobacco I had ever set eyes on; " queens?
There are hundreds of hives here, as you can see;
and there isn't a queen in any one of them."

He drew at the pipe until he had coaxed it into
full blast, and the smoke went drifting idly away
through the still April sunshine. We were in the
very midst of the bee-garden, sitting side by side on
the honey-barrow after a long morning's work
among the hives; and the old bee-man had lapsed
into his usual contemplative mood.

" 'Tis a pretty idea," he went on, " this of
royalty, and a realm of dutiful subjects, and all the
rest of it, in bee-life. But experience in apiculture,
as with most things of this world, does away with
a good many fine and fanciful notions. Now, the
mother-bee in a hive, whatever else you might call
her, is certainly not a queen, in the sense of ruling
over the other bees in the colony. The truth is she
has little or nothing to do with the direction of
affairs. All the thinking and contriving is done by

93

94 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

the worker-bees. They have the whole manage-
ment of the hive, and simply look upon the queen as
a much prized and carefully-guarded piece of egg-
laying machinery, to be made the most of as long
as her usefulness lasts, but to be thrown over and
replaced by another the moment her powers begin
to flag."

" No; there are no queens, properly so called, in
bee-life," he continued. ■" All that belongs to the
good old times when there were nothing but straw-
skeps, and 'twas well-nigh impossible to get at the
rights of anything; so the bee-keeper went on
believing that honey was made out of starshine,
and young bees were bred from the juice of white
honeysuckle, which was all pretty enough in its
way, even though it warn't true. But nowadays,
when they make hives with comb-frames that can
be lifted out and looked at in the broad light of day,
folk are beginning to understand a power of things
about bees that were dark mysteries only a while
ago."

He puffed at his pipe for a little in silence. Far
away over the great province of hives, the clock
on the extracting-house pointed to half-past twelve;
and, true to their usual time, the home-staying bees
— the housekeepers and nurses and lately hatched
young ones — were out for their midday exercise.
The foragers were going to and fro as thickly as
ever with their loads of pollen and water for the
still cradled larvae within; but now round every hive
a little cloud of bees hovered, filling the sunshine
with the drowsy music of their wings. The old
bee-man took up his theme again presently at the
point he had broken it off.

THE QUEEN BEE 95

" If," said he, " you keep a fairly close watch on
the progress of any one particular hive, from the
time the first eggs appear in the combs early in
January, 'tis very easy to see how the old false
ideas got into general use. At first glance a bee-
colony looks very much like a kingdom; and the
single large bee, that all the others pay court to and
attend so carefully, seems very like a queen. Then,
when you look a little deeper and begin to under-
stand more, appearances are still all in favour of
the old view of things. The mother-bee seems, on
the face of it, a miracle of intelligence and foresight.
While, as far as you know, all other creatures in the
world bring forth their young of both sexes hap-
hazard, this one can lay male or female eggs
apparently at will. You watch her going from
comb to comb, and the eggs she drops in the small
cells hatch out females, and those she puts in the
larger ones are always males, or drones. More
than that: she seems always to know the exact
condition of the hive, and to be able to limit her
egg-laying according to its need, or otherwise, of
population; for either you see her filling only a few
cells each day in a little patch of comb that can be
covered with the palm of your hand, or she goes to
work on a gigantic scale, and, in twenty-four hours,
produces eggs that weigh more than twice as much
as her whole body."

He got up now and began pacing to and fro, as
was his custom when much in earnest over his bee-
talk.

" Then," he went on, "to cap all, as the honey
season draws on to its height, you are forced
presently to realise that the queen has conceived and

96 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

is carrying through a scheme for the good of her
subjects that would do credit to the wisest ruler
ever born in human purple. Every day of summer
sunshine has brought thousands of young bees to
life. The hive is getting overcrowded. Sooner or
later one of two things must happen — either the
increase of population must be checked, or a great
party must be formed to leave the old home and go
out to establish another one. Then it is that the
mother-bee seems to prove beyond a doubt her
wisdom and queenliness. She decides for the
emigration; but as a leader must be found for the
party, and none is at hand, she forms the resolve
to head it herself. From that moment a change
comes over the whole hive. Preparation for the
coming event goes on fast and furiously, and excite-
ment increases day by day. But the queen seems to
forget nothing. A new ruler for the old realm
must be provided to take her place when she is gone
for ever; and now you see a party of bees set to
work on something that fairly beggars curiosity.
At first it looks exactly like an acorn-cup in wax
hanging from the under-edge of the comb. Per-
haps the next time you look the cup has grown to
twice its original size; and now you see it is half
full of a glistening white jelly. The next time,
maybe, you open the hive, the acorn has been added
to the cup ; the queen-cell is sealed over and finished,
and about a week later there comes out a full-grown
queen bee, twice the size of the ordinary worker
and quite different in shape and often in colour too.
But days before the new ruler is ready the excite-
ment in the hive has grown to fever-pitch. If
you come out then in the quiet of the night

THE QUEEN BEE 97

and put your ear close to the hive, you will hear a
shrill piping noise which the ancient skeppists tell
you is the old queen calling her subjects together
for the swarm on the morrow. And, sure enough,
out she goes with half the population of the hive in
her train, to look for a new home; and in a day
or so the new queen comes out of her cell to take
charge of the colony."

He paused to fill the old briar pipe again,
lighting it with slow deliberate puffs, and I could
not help marking how nearly alike in colour were
the bowl and his rugged, sunburnt, clever face.

" But now, look you! " said he, suddenly
levelling the pipe-stem like a pistol at me to
emphasise his words. " If the mother-bee really
brought all this about, queen would not be a good
enough name for her. But the truth is, throughout
all the wonder-workings of the hive, the queen is
little more than an instrument, a kind of automaton,
merely doing what the workers compel her to do.
They are the real queens in the hive, and the mother-
bee is the one and only subject. Did you ever
think what a queen-bee actually is, and how she
conies to be there at all? The fact is that the
workers have made her for their own wise purposes,
just as they make the comb and the honey to store
in it. The egg she is hatched from is in no way
different from any worker-egg. If you take one
from a queen-cell and put it in the ordinary comb,
it will hatch out a common female worker-bee : and
an egg transferred from worker-comb to a queen-
cell becomes a full-grown queen. Thousands and
thousands of worker-eggs are laid in a hive during
the season, and each of those could be made into
Q

98 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

a queen if the workers chose. But the worker-egg
is laid into a small cell, and the larva is bred on a
bare minimum of food, at the least possible cost in
time, trouble, and space to the hive; while, when
a new queen is wanted, a cell as big as your finger-
top is built, and the larva is stuffed like a prize-pig
through all its five days of active life, until, with
unlimited food and time and room to grow in, it
comes out at last a perfect mother-bee."

" But," I asked him, " how is the population in
the hive regulated, and how can the apportionment
of the sexes be brought about? If, as you say, the
queen does only what she is made to do by the
workers, and that unthinkingly and mechanically,
you only increase the difficulty of the problem."

" As for increasing or restricting the number of
eggs laid," he said, " that is only a question of
food; and here you see how the workers control the
mother-bee entirely, and, through her, the whole con-
dition of the hive. When she is egg-laying they feed
her from their own mouths with special predigested
food; and the more she gets of this, the more eggs are
laid. But when the season is done, and the need
for a large population over, this rich stimulating
diet is kept from her. She then must go to the
honey-cells like the rest, or starve; and at once her
egg-laying powers begin to fall off. And it is in
exactly the same way — by their management of the
queen — that the workers control the proportion of
the sexes in a hive. 'Tis more difficult to explain,
but here is about the rights of it. Directly the new-
hatched queen-bee is ready for work, she flies our
to meet the drones; and one impregnation lasts her
whole life through. But the eggs themselves are

THE QUEEN BEE 99

not fertilised until the very moment of laying, and
then only in the case of those laid in worker-comb :
drone-eggs are never impregnated at all. Now, in
all likelihood, as the queen is being driven over tlje
combs, it is the size of the cell that determines
whether the egg laid shall be male or female. When
the queen thrusts her long pointed body into the
narrow worker-cell, her position is a straight, up-
right one, and the egg cannot be laid without passing
over the impregnation-gland; but with the larger
drone-cell the queen has room to curve herself,
which is the means, I think, of the egg escaping
without being fertilised. And so you see it is only
the female bee that has two parents; the drone has
no father at all."

CHAPTER XIII

THE SONG OF THE HIVES

"C^ROM the lane, where it dipped down between
its rose-mantled hedges, nothing of the bee-
garden could be seen. The dense barricade of
briar and hawthorn hid all but the lichened roof of
the ancient dwelling-house; and strangers going by
on their way to the village saw nothing of the
crowding hives, and marked little else than the
usual busy murmur of insect-life common to any
sunny day in June.

But when they came out of the green tunnel of
hedgerows into the open fields beyond, chance way-
farers always stopped and looked about them
wonderingly, at length fixing a puzzled glance
intently on the blue sky itself. At this corner, and
nowhere else, seemingly, the air was full of a deep,
reverberant music. A steady torrent of rich sound
streamed by overhead; and yet, to the untutored
observer, the most diligent scrutiny failed to reveal
its origin. A few gnats harped in the sunbeams.
Now and again a bumble-bee struck a deep chord or
two in the wayside herbage underfoot. But this
clear, strong voice from the skies was altogether
unexplainable. To human sight, at least, the blue

joo

THE SONG OF THE HIVES 101

air and sunshine held nothing to account for it; and
the stranger unversed in honey-bee lore, after taking
his fill of this melodious mystery, generally ended
by giving up the problem as insoluble, and passing
on to his business or pleasure in the little green-
garlanded hamlet under the hill.

That the bees of a fairly large apiary should
produce a considerable volume of sound in their
passage to and fro between the hives and the honey-
pastures is in no way remarkable. In the heyday of
the year — the brief six weeks' honey-flow of the
English summer — probably each normal colony of
bees would send out an army of foragers at least
twenty thousand strong. What really seems matter
for wonder is the way in which bees appear to
concentrate their movements to certain well-defined
tracks in the atmosphere. They do not distribute
themselves broadcast over the intervening space,
as they might be expected to do, but wonderfully
keep to certain definite restricted thoroughfares,
no matter how near or how remote their foraging
grounds may be.

And this particular gap in the chain of hedgerows
really marked the great main highway for the bees
between the hives and the clover-fields silvering the
whole wide stretch of hill and dale beyond. Every
moment had its winged thousands going and
returning. At any time, if a fine net could have
been cast suddenly a few fathoms upward, it would
have fallen to earth black and heavy with bees; but
the singing multitude went by at so fast and furious
a pace that, to the keenest sight, not one of the
eager crew was visible. Only the sound of their
going was plain to all; a mighty tenor note abroad

loa THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

in the sunshine, a thronging sustained melody that
never ceased all through the heat and burthen of
the glittering summer's day.

When Shelley heard the " yellow bees in the ivy-
bloom," and he of Avonside wrote of " singing
masons building roofs of gold," probably neither
thought of the humming of the hive-bee as anything
more than an ingredient in the general delightful
country chorus, as distinct from the less-inspiring
labour-note of busy humanity in a town. With the
single exception, perhaps, of Wordsworth, poets,
thinking most of their line, commonly miss the
subtler phases of wild life, such as the continually
changing emphasis and capricious variation in bird
song, the real sound made by growth, or the
unceasing movement of things conventionally held
to be inert. And in the same way the endlessly
varied song of the bees has been epitomised by
imaginative writers generally into a sound, pleasantly
arcadian enough, but little more suggestive of life
and meaning than the hum of telegraph wires in a
breeze.

Yet there are few sounds in nature more bewilder-
ingly complex than this. For every season in the
year the song of the hives has its own distinct
appropriate quality, and this, again, is constantly
influenced by the time of day, and even by the
momentary aspect of the weather. A bee-keeper of
the old school — and he is sure to be the " character,"
the quaint original of a village — manages his hives
as much by ear as by sight. The general note of
each hive reveals to him intuitively its progress and
condition. He seems to know what to expect on
almost any day in the year, so that if Rip van Winkle

THE SONG OF THE HIVES 103

had been an apiarist the nearest bee-garden would
have been as sure a guide to him, in respect of the
time of year at least, as the sun's declining arc in
the heaven is to the tired reapers in respect of the
hour of day.

Most people — and with these must be included
even lifelong country-dwellers — are wont to regard
the humming of the hive-bee as a simple monotone,
produced entirely by the rapid movement of the
wings. But this conception halts very far short of
the actual truth. In reality, the sound made by a
honey-bee is threefold. It can consist .either of a
single tone, a combination of two notes, or even a
grand triple chord, heard principally in moments of
excitement, such as when a swarming-party is on the
wing, or in late autumn and early spring, when civil
war will often break out in an ill-managed apiary.
The actual buzzing sound is produced by the wings;
the deeper musical tones by the air alternately
sucked in and driven out through the spiracles,
which are breathing-tubes ranged along each side
of a bee's body; while the shrill, clarinet-like note
comes from the true voice-apparatus itself. In
ordinary flight it is the wings and the respiration-
tubes conjointly which produce the steady volume
of sound heard as the honey-makers stream over the
hedgetop towards the distant clover-fields; and this
is the note also that pervades the bee-garden through
every sunny hour of the working-day. The rich,
soft murmur coming from the spiracles is probably
never heard except when the bee is flying, but both
the true voice and the whirring wing-melody are
familiar as separate sounds to every bee-keeper
who studies his hives.

104 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

When the summer night has shut down warm
and still over the red dusk of evening, and the last
airy loiterer is safely home from the fields, a
curious change comes to the bee-garden. The old
analogy between a concourse of hives and a human
city is, at this season, utterly at fault. Silence and
rest after the day's work may be the portion of the
larger community, but in the time of the great honey-
flow there is neither rest nor slumber for the bees.
A fury of labour possesses them, one and all; and
darkness does not remit, but merely transposes the
scene of, their activity. Coming out into the garden
at this hour for a quiet pipe among the hives — an
old and favourite habit with most bee-keeping
veterans — the new spirit abroad is at once manifest.
The sulky, fragrant darkness is silent, quiet with
the influence of the starshine overhead; but the very
earth of the footway seems to vibrate with the
imprisoned energy of the hives. This is the time
when the low, rustling roar of wing-music can best
be heard, and one of the most wonderful phases of
bee-life studied. The problem of the ventilation of
human hives is attacked commonly on one main
principle — unstinted ingress for fresh air and a like
abundant means of outward passage for the bad.
But, if the bees are to be credited, modern sanitary-
scientists are trimming altogether on the wrong
tack. A colony of bees will allow one aperture,
and one alone, in the hive, to serve all and every
purpose. If the enterprising novice in beemanship
gimlets a row of ventilation-holes in the back of his
hive — an idea that occurs to most tyros in apicul-
ture — the bees will infallibly seal them all up again
before morning. They work on entirely different

THE SONG OF THE HIVES 105

principles, impelled by their especial needs. The
economy of the hive requires the temperature to be
absolutely and immediately within the control of the
bees, and this is only possible when the ventilatory
system is entirely mechanical. The evaporation of
moisture from the new-gathered nectar, and the
hatching of the young brood, necessitate an amount
of heat much less than that required for wax-
generating; as soon as the wax-makers begin to
cluster the temperature of the hive is at once
increased. But if a current of air were continually
passing through the hive these necessary heat
variations would be difficult to manage, even
supposing them possible at all; so the bees have
invented their unique system of a single passage-
way, combined with an ingenious and complicated
process of fanning, by which the fresh air is sucked
in at one side of the entrance and the foul air drawn
out at the other, the atmosphere of the hive being
thus maintained in a constant state of circulation,
fast or slow, according to the temperature needed.

In the hot summer weather these fanning-parties
are at work continuously, being relieved by others
at intervals of a few minutes throughout the day.
But at night, when the whole population of the hive
is at home, the need for ventilation is greatly
augmented, and then the open lines of fanners often
stretch out over the alighting-board six or seven
ranks deep, making an harmonious uproar that, on
a still night, will travel incredible distances.

This tense, forceful labour-song of the bee-garden,
heard unremittingly throughout the hours of dark-
ness, is always pleasant, often indescribably soothing
in its effect. But it is essentially a communal note,

106 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

expressive only of the well or ill being of the hive
at large. The individuality, even personal idiosyn-
crasy, which undoubtedly exists among bees, finds
its utterance mainly through the true voice-organ.
You cannot stand for long, here, in the quiet of
the summer night, listening to one particular hive,
without sooner or later becoming aware of other
sounds, in addition to the general musical hubbub
of the fanning army. It is evident that a nervous,
high-strung spirit pervades the colony, especially
during the season of the great honey-flow. Their
common agreement on all main issues does not
prevent these " virgin daughters of toil " from
engaging in sundry sharp altercations and mutual
hustlings in the course of their business; and, at
times of threatening weather, a tendency towards
snappishness, and a whimsical perversity charac-
teristically feminine, seem to make up the prevailing
tone. It is during these chance forays that the true
voice of the honey-bee, apart from the sounds made
by wing and spiracle, can best be differentiated.

CHAPTER XIV

CONCERNING HONEY

""pHE bee-keepers in English villages to-day are
all familiar — too familiar at times — with the
holiday-making stranger at the garden gate inquiring
for honey. Somehow or other the demand for this
old natural sweet-food appears to have greatly
increased of recent years among wandering towns-
folk in the country. A competent bee-master,
dealing with a large number of combs, will not
mingle them indiscriminately, but will unerringly
assort them, so that he will have perhaps at the end
of the season almost as many kinds of honey in store
as there are fields on his countryside. I speak, of
course, not of the large bee-farmer — who, em-
ploying of necessity wholesale methods, can aim
only at a good all-round commercial sample of no
finely distinctive colour or flavour — but of the con-
noisseur in bee-craft, the gourmet among the hives,
who knows that there are as many varieties in
honey as there are in wine, and would as little dream
of confusing them.

Honey lovers who have been eating wax all their
days will be as hardly dissuaded from the practice
as he whose custom it may be to consume the paper

107

io8 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

in which his butter is wrapped, or take a proportion
of the blue sugar-bag with the lumps in his tea.
Yet the last are no more absurdities than the former,
except in degree. Pure beeswax has neither savour
nor nutrient properties, and passes wholly unas-
similated through the human system. Even the
bees themselves cannot feed upon it when at dire
extremes : the whole hive may die of starvation in
the midst of waxen plenty. Of all creatures, mice,
and the larvae of two species of moth, alone will
make away with it; and even in their case it is
doubtful whether the comb be not destroyed for
the sake of the odd grains of pollen and the pupa-
skins it contains. Broadly speaking, unless you can
trust a dipped finger-tip to reveal to you on the
moment the qualities of this village-garden honey,
it is always safer to buy in the comb. But the wax
should never be eaten. The proper way to deal
with honeycomb at table is to cut it to the width of
the knife-blade ; and, laying it upon the plate with the
cells vertical, press the blade flat upon it, when the
honey will flow out right and left. In this way,
if duly carried out, the honey is scientifically separ-
ated, no more than one per cent remaining in the
slab of wax.

The Bee as a Chemist

It is not strange, because it is so common, to
find people who have eaten honeycomb regularly
all their lives, yet are unknowingly ignorant of the
first rudimentary fact in its nature and composition.
To know that you do not know is an intelligible
state, the initial true step towards knowledge; but
to be full of erroneous information, and that complac-

CONCERNING HONEY 109

ently, is to be ignorant indeed. Of such are the
old lady who dwelt in the Mile End Road, and
believed that cocoanuts were monkeys' eggs, and
the man who will tell you without expectancy of
contradiction that honey is the food of bees.

Now this is no essay in cheap paradox, but a
sober attempt to reinstate in the public mind the
unsophisticated truth. The natural foods of the
bee-hive are the nectar and the pollen, the " love
ferment " of the flowers. On these the bee subsists
entirely, so long as she can obtain them, and will
go to her. honey stores only when nature's fresh
supplies have failed. One speaks by poetic licence,
or looseness, of bees gathering honey from blos-
soming plants. The fact is they do nothing of the
kind, and never did. The sweet juices of clover,
heather, and the like, differ fundamentally, both in
appearance and in chemical properties from honey.
Though the main ingredient in honey is nectar, the
two are totally different things; and honey, far from
being the normal food of bees, is only a standby
for hard times, a sort of emergency ration, put up
in as little compass and with as great a concen-
tration as such things can be.

The story of how honey is made, and why it is
made at all, forms one of the most interesting items
in the history of the hive-bee. In a land where
nectar-yielding plants flourish all the year through,
if such a spot exist at all, there would be no honey,
because the necessity for it would not occur.
Hive-bees in such a land would go all their lives,
and assuredly never dream of honey-making. But
wherever there is winter, or a season when the
supply of nectar and pollen temporarily fails, the

no THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

bee, who does not hibernate in the common sense
of the term, must devise a means of supporting life
through the famine period. Many creatures can
and do accomplish this by merely laying up in
a comatose condition until such time as their
natural food is plentiful again, and they may safely
resume their old activities. But this will not do
for the doughty honey-bee. A curious aspect of
her life is the way in which she appears to recognise
the competitive spirit in all the higher forms of
earthly existence, and deliberately sets herself in
the fore-rank of affairs with that principle in view.
It would be easy for a few hundred worker-bees to
get together in some warm nook underground,
with that carefully tended piece of egg-laying
mechanism, their queen, in their midst; and in a
semi-dormant condition to pass the dark winter
months through, gradually rousing their own fires
of life as the year warmed up again in the spring.
But such a system would mean that the colony
would have to start afresh from the bottom of
the ladder of progress with every year. The hive-
bee has conceived a better plan, and the basis, the
essential factor of it all, is this thing of mystery
which we call honey.

The True Purpose of the Hive

The ancient Roman name for a beehive was
alvus, which, translated into its blunt Anglo-Saxon
equivalent, means belly. And this gives us in a word
the whole secret about honey-making. As a matter
of fact, the hive in summer acts as a digestive
chamber, wherein the winter aliment of the stock is

CONCERNING HONEY in

prepared. The bees, during their ordinary work-
aday life, subsist on the nectar and pollen which
they are continually bringing into the hive. Much
pollen is laid by in the cells in its raw condition,
but pollen is almost exclusively a tissue-former, and
it is not used by the worker-bees during the winter
for their own sustenance, but preserved until early
spring, when it forms the principal component in
the bee-milk on which the larvae are mainly fed.
The nectar, however, is necessary at all times to
support life in the mature bees, and it must therefore
be stored for use during the long months when
there are no flowers to secrete it.

It is here that we get a glimpse into the ways of
the honey-bee that may well give spur to the most
wonder-satiated amongst us. If a sample of fresh
nectar is examined, it will be found to consist of
about seventy per cent of water, the small remainder
of its bulk being made up of what is chemically
known as cane sugar, together with a trace of cer-
tain essential oils and aromatic principles. It is
practically nothing but sweetened and flavoured
water. But ripe honey shows a very different
composition. The oils and essences are there, with
some added acids; but of water there is no more
than seven to ten per cent ; practically the entire bulk
of good honey consists of sugar, but it is grape
sugar, with scarce a trace of the cane sugar which
nectar exclusively contains. To put the thing in
plainest words — the economic honey-bee, finding
herself with three or four months to get through
at the least possible cost in energy and nutriment,
has scientifically reasoned out the matter, and, among
other ingenious provisions, has arranged to subject

ii2 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

her winter food to a process of pre-digestion during
the summer, so that when she consumes it there
shall be neither force expended in its assimilation
nor waste products taken with it, needing to be
afterwards expelled. Honey, in fact, is the nectar
digested, and then regurgitated just when it is
ready to be absorbed into the system. It is almost
certain that every drop goes through this process
twice, and possibly three times, in each case by
different bees; and the heat of the hive still further
contributes to the object in view by driving off the
superfluous moisture from the nectar so treated,
and thus concentrating it into an almost perfect
food.

CHAPTER XV

IN THE ABBOT'S BEE-GARDEN

CTANDING in the lane without, and looking up
at the grey forbidding walls of the old abbey,
you wondered how anything human could exist on
the other side; but, once past the heavy iron-studded
gate, your thoughts doubled like hares in the
opposite direction.

It seemed good to be a monk, if life could be all
sunshine, and quietude, and beauty like that. As
you waited in the shadow of the great stone-flagged
portico, while your coming was announced, this
feeling grew deeper with every moment. The
garden sloped down to the river's edge, winding
footway, and green lawn, and kitchen-plot all alike
girdled and barricaded with rich-hued 'autumn
flowers. Through the mass of crimson fuchsia and
many-coloured dahlia and hollyhock, bowers of
pink and white geranium with stems as thick as
your wrist, ancient apple-trees drooping under their
burden of scarlet fruit, crowding jungles of roses,
you could see the bright waters sweeping by, and
hear their busy sound as they won a way amidst
H 113

ii4 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

the rocky boulders strewing the bed of the tortuous
Devon stream.

Here and there in the sunny field-of-view visible
through the arched doorway, black-robed figures
were quietly at work: some digging; others
gathering apples in the orchard; one sturdy brother
was mowing the Abbot's lawn, the bright blade
coming perilously near his fluttering skirts at every
stroke; another went by trundling a wheelbarrow
full of green vegetables for the refectory table.
There was a distant cackle of poultry, blending oddly
with the solemn chant that came from the chapel
hard by. Robins sang everywhere, and starlings
clucked and whistled in the valerian that topped the
great encircling wall. But wherever you looked,
whatever drew away your attention for the
moment, you were sure to come back to the con-
sideration of one preponderant yet inexplicable
thing. A steady, deep note was upon the air.
Rich and resonant, it seemed to come from all
directions at once. The dim, grey-vaulted entrance-
porch was full of it. Looking up into the dusk of
oaken beams overhead, there it seemed at its
strangest and loudest. Queerest fact of all, it
appeared to have some mysterious affinity with the
sunshine, for when a stray white argosy of cloud
came drifting over the azure and obscured for a
minute the glad light, this full, sonorous note died
suddenly away, rising as swiftly again to its old
power and volume when the sunbeams glowed back
once more over the spacious garden, and over the
riverside willows that shed their gold of dying
leafage with every breath of the soft south wind.

It wag not until you stepped outside, and looked

IN THE ABBOT'S BEE-GARDEN 115

upward over the face of the old building, that you
realised what it all meant. From its foundation to
the highest stone of the ancient bell-turret, the
whole front of the place was thickly mantled with
ivy in full flower, and every yellow tuft of blossom
was besieged with bees. There seemed tens of
thousands of them, hovering and humming every-
where; and thousands more arriving with every
moment out of the blue air, or darting off again
fully laden, and away to some invisible bourne over
the ruddy roof of orchard trees.

Intent on this vociferous wonder, you do not
catch the footfall on the gravel-path in your rear,
or see the sombre figure of the Abbot as he comes
towards you, the sweep of his black frock setting
all the marigolds nodding behind him, as though
from a sudden flaw of wind. And now you have
another pleasurable disillusionment as to monkish
conditions of being. Trudging along the deep-cut
Devonshire lanes on your way to the Abbey,
through the rain of falling autumn leaves, you
pictured the place to yourself as a kind of sacred
sink of desolation, inhabited by a crew of sour-
visaged anchorites, who found only godlessness in
sunshine, and in cakes-and-ale nothing but assured
perdition. But here, coming towards you, smiling,
and with outstretched hand, is the last kind of
human being you expected to see. Clad from head
to foot in sober black, with, for ornament, but the
one plain silver cross swinging at his breast, the
Abbot shows, unmistakably, for a gentleman of
cultured and enlightened mien. A fine, swarthy
face, kind, calm eyes behind gold spectacles, a
voice like an old violin, and a grip of the hand that

n6 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

makes you wince with its abounding- welcome, all
combine to set you there and then at your ease;
and talk begins at once on the old, familiar plane
among bee-keepers — the quick, enthusiastic inter-
change, each participant as ready a listener as
learner, common all the world over, wherever
flowers grow and men love bees.

The brothers of the old Benedictine monastery
— so the Abbot tells you, as he leads the way
towards the hives, through the sun-riddled laby-
rinth — have kept bees, probably, for more than a
thousand years. There is no doubt that the original
abbey building stood there, in the wooded cleft of
Devon valley, so long ago as the sixth century, nor
little question that its founder was a bee-man, for
he was contemporary and friend of the great St
Modonnoc who himself first taught Irishmen to
keep bees.

" Monks, in the very earliest times, were almost
invariably apiculturists," argues the Abbot. He
stops in the orchard, the more impressively to quote
Latin, the glib leaf-shadows playing the while over
his tonsured head. " Lac et mel; panis, vena
rudis. Milk and honey, and coarse oaten bread.
At least we know, from our chronicles, that these
were the common daily fare of our Order more
than eight hundred years ago; and honey remains
a part of our food to this day."

Thus overawed with the centuries, you begin to
form a mental picture of the bee-garden you are
about to visit, voyaging so pleasantly through wind-
ing path and shady thicket, with the bell-like sound
of the water growing clearer and clearer at every
step. With all that hoary tradition of the ages

IN THE ABBOT'S BEE-GARDEN 117

behind them, you promise yourself, these monks
will have clung to their bee-keeping mediaevalism
as to some sacred, inviolable thing. There will be
no movable comb-frames, nor American sections,
nor weird, foreign races of bees. They will never
have heard even of foul-brood, or napthol-beta, or
the host of things that bless or curse modern apicul-
ture at every turn of the way. But, instead, there
will be a tangled wilderness of late blossom, such
as only Devonshire can show in November; dome-
shaped hives of straw, each with its singing com-
pany about it; perhaps a superannuated brother or
two quietly making straw hackles to shield the hives
against coming winter weather; even, perchance,
the smell of burning brimstone on the air, as the
last remnant of the honey-harvest is gathered in the
ancient way, by " taking up " the strongest and
the weakest colonies of bees.

And then a wicket-gate in the old wall determines
the path and your ruminations together. A sudden
burst of sunshine; the rich medley of sound from
fourscore hives lifting high above the song of the
purling stream; and you are out on the broad, green
river-bank, looking on at a scene very different from
the one you have expected.

There are no old-fashioned hives; they are all of
the latest, most scientific pattern, ranged under the
shelter of the wall in two wide terraces of close-
shaven turf, looking southward over the stream.
There are outhouses of the most approved design,
where all the business of a modern apiary is going
on. Here and there you see black-f rocked figures
at work, dexterously examining the colonies. There
is the deep, whirring note of honey-extractors; the

u8 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

clamour of carpenters' tools; the faint, sickly smell
from the wax-boilers; all the familiar evidences of
bee-farming carried on in the most modern,
twentieth-century way.

As you look down the long, trim avenue of
gaily-painted hives your companion has a quiet
side-glance upon you, obviously noting your
disappointment.

" What would you? " says he, and his deep voice
rings like a passing-bell for all your dreams.
" Everything must move with the times, or must
inevitably perish. Modernism, rightly understood,
is God's fairest, most priceless gift to the universe.
It is a crucible through which all things of true
metal must pass to lose the accumulated dross of
the ages, keeping their original pure substance, but
taking the new shape required of them by latter-
day needs. It is so with the old, dim windows of
man's faith; daily the glass is being taken out,
smelted down, purified, replaced; we can see abroad
into distances now never before visible. And so it
must prove even with bee-keeping, which is one of
the oldest human occupations in the world."

He waves his hand towards the sunny prospect
before you. Beyond the river the burning apple-
woods soar steadily upward; and high above these,
stretching away to meet the blue sky, lie the Devon
moorlands, once all rose-red with blossoming
heathefr, but now, parched and brown, except where
a grey crag or rock puts forth its jagged head.

" It is a fine thing, perhaps," says the Abbot,
thoughtfully swinging his silver cross in the sun-
beams, " to love old, ignorant customs, old,
benighted, useless errors, for their picturesqueness

IN THE ABBOT'S BEE-GARDEN 119

and beauty alone. But don't you think it is a still
finer thing to teach poor people how they may win
from the common hillside plenty of rich, nourishing
food at almost no cost at all? And that is what
we are doing here. Modern bee-science, it is true,
gives us only an ugly utilitarian hive. It sweeps
away all the bright, iridescent cobwebs in the path
of bee-keeping, and substitutes hard fact for pretty
fairy-tale. But the sum of it all is that the poor
cottager gains, not twenty or thirty pounds at most
of coarse, unsaleable sweet food from his hives,
but perhaps hundredweights of pure, choice,
section-honey, which, sold in the proper market,
will clothe his children comfortably, and make it
possible for them to lead decent human lives."

CHAPTER XVI

BEES AND THEIR MASTERS

'"PHERE are three great tokens of the coming of
spring in the country — the elm-blossom, the
cry of the young lambs, and the first rich song of
the awakening bees.

All three come together about the end of February
or beginning of March, and break into the winter
dearth and silence in much the same sudden,
unpremeditated way. You look at the woodlands,
cowering under the lash of the shrill north wind,
and all seems bare and black and lifeless. But
the wind dies down in a fiery sunset. With the
darkness comes a warm breath out of the west. On
the morrow the spring sunshine runs high through
all the valleys like liquid gold; the elm-tops are
ablaze with purple; from the lambing-pens far and
near a new cry lifts into the still, warm air; and
in the bee-gardens there is the unwonted, old-
remembered symphony, prophetic of the coming
summer days.

The shepherd, the bee-man, the woodlander — these
three live in the focus of the seasons, and feel their
changes long before any other class of country folk.
But the bee-man, if he would prosper, must take

120

BEES AND THEIR MASTERS 121

the sun as his veritable daily guide from year's end
to year's end. Those whose conception of a bee-
keeper is mainly of one who looks on from his
cottage door while his winged thousands work for
him, and who has but to stretch out his hand once
a year to gather the hoard he has had no part in
winning, know little of modern beemanship. This
would be almost literally true of the old skeppist
days, when bees were left much to their own devices,
and thirty pounds of indifferent honey was reckoned
a good take from a populous hive. But the modern
movable comb-frame has altered all that. Now
ninety or a hundred pounds weight of honey per hive
is expected, with ordinarily good seasons, on a
well-managed bee-farm; and in exceptional honey-
flows very strong stocks of bees have been known
to double and even treble that amount.

The movable comb-frame has three prime uses.
The hives can be opened at any time and their
condition ascertained without having to wait for
outside indications. Brood-combs, with the young
bees all ready to hatch out, can be taken from
strong colonies and given to weak ones, and thus
the population of all stocks may be equalised. The
filled honeycombs can be removed, emptied by the
centrifugal extractor, and the combs returned to the
hive ready for another charge; and so the most
onerous and exacting labour of the hive, comb-
building, is largely obviated.

The modern beehive has another great advantage
over the old straw skep, in that its size can be
regulated according to the needs of each colony.
-More combs can be added as the stock grows, and
thus no limit is set to its capacity. With the

122 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

ancient form of hive fifteen or twenty thousand bees
meant a crowded citadel, and there was nothing
for it but to relieve the congestion by swarming.
But the swarming habit has always been the
principal obstacle to large honey-takes; and the
problem which the modern bee-keeper has to solve
is how to prevent his stocks from thus breaking
themselves up into several hopelessly weak
detachments.

It is all a war of wits between the bees and their
masters. In nature the honey-bee is possessed of
an inveterate caution. Famine is especially dreaded,
and the number of mouths to fill in a hive is always
kept strictly to the limits of the incoming food-
supply. Thus a natural bee-colony is seldom ready
for the honey-flow when it begins in early April,
because it is only then that the raising of the young
brood is allowed its fullest scope. This, however,
is of no importance as far as the bees themselves are
concerned, for a balance of stores of about twenty
pounds weight at the end of a season will safely
carry the most populous colony through any ordinary
winter.

But from the bee-master's point of view it means
practically a lost harvest. All the arts and devices
of the modern bee-keeper, therefore, are set to
work to overcome this timid conservatism of the
hives, and to induce the creation of immense colonies
of worker-bees as early as possible in the season, so
that there may be no lack of labourers when the
harvest is ready.

These first warm days of March, that bring the
elm-blossom, and the cry of the lambs, and the old
sweet music of the bee-gardens together, really

BEES AND THEIR MASTERS 123

form the most critical time of all for the apiarist
who depends on his honey for his bread-and-butter.
It is the natural beginning of the bee-year, and on
his skill as a craftsman from now onward all chance
of a prosperous season will rest. It is true that,
within the hive, the bees have been awake and stir-
ring for a long time past. Ever since the " turn of
the days," just before Christmas, the queen-mother
has been busy; and now there are young bees, little
grey fluffy creatures, everywhere in the throng; and
the area of sealed brood-cells is steadily growing.
But it is only now that the world out-of-doors be-
comes of any interest to the bees.

This is the time when the scientific bee-man must
get to work. His whole policy is one of benevolent
fraud. He knows that the population in his hives
will not be allowed to increase until there is a
steady, assured income of nectar and pollen. He
cannot create an early flower-crop, but he does
almost the same thing. Every hive is supplied with
a feeding-stage, where cane-sugar syrup, of nearly
the same consistency as the natural flower-secretion,
is administered constantly; and he places trays full of
pea-flour at different stations amongst his hives, as
a substitute for pollen. There is a special art in the
administration of this sugar-syrup. One might
think that if the bees required feeding at all, the
more they were given the better they would thrive.
But experience is all against this notion. The
artificial food is given, not to replenish an exhausted
larder, but to simulate a natural new supply. This,
in the ordinary state of things, would begin in about
a month's time, coming at first scantily, and gradually
increasing. By syrup-feeding early in March, the

124 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

bee-master sets the clock of the year forward by-
many weeks. He imitates nature by arranging his
feeding-stages so that the supply of syrup can be
limited to the actual day-to-day wants of the colony,
allowing the bees freer access to the syrup-bottles
from time to time as their numbers augment.

If this is adroitly done, the effect on the colony is
remarkable. The little company of bees whose part
it is to direct the actions of the queen-mother, seeing
what is apparently the natural fresh supply of food
coming in, in daily increasing quantities, at length
cast their hereditary reserve aside, and allow the
queen fullest scope for egg-laying. The result is
that by the time the real honey-flow commences the
population of each hive is double what it would be if
it had been left to its own resources, and the honey-
yield is more than proportionately great. It is well
know among bee-men that a hive containing, say,
forty thousand workers will produce very much
more honey than two hives together numbering
twenty thousand each.

There is another vital consideration in this work
of early stimulation of the hives, which the capable
bee-master will never neglect. When the natural
honey-glut is on, the whole hive reeks with the
odours given off from the evaporating nectar. The
raw material, as gathered from the flowers, must be
reduced by the heat of the hive and other agencies
to about one-quarter of its original bulk before it
is changed into mature honey. The artificial food
given to the bees will, of course, have none of this
scent, and the old honey-stores in the hive are
hermetically sealed under their waxen cappings. To
complete the deception which has been so elaborately

BEES AND THEIR MASTERS 125

contrived, the bee-master must furnish his . hives
with a new atmosphere. This he does by slicing off
the cappings from some of the old store-combs, thus
letting out their imprisoned fragrance, and filling
the hive at once with the very essence of the clover-
fields where the bees worked in the bygone summer
days. The smell of the honey at this time, combined
with the regular and increasing supply of syrup,
acts like a powerful stimulant on the whole stock, and
the work of brood-raising goes rapidly forward.

In intensive culture of all kinds there are risks to
be run peculiar to the artificial state of things
engendered, and modern bee-breeding is no
exception to the rule. When once this fictile
prosperity is installed by the bee-master, no lapse or
variation in the due amount of food must occur.
Even a single day's remission of supplies may undo
all that a month's careful manipulation has brought
about. English bees understand their native climate
only too well, and the bitter experience of former
years has taught them to be prepared for a return
of hard weather at any moment. Under natural
conditions, if a few weeks' warmth has induced them
to raise population, and a sudden return of cold
ensues, the bees will take very prompt and stern
measures to meet the threatening calamity of
starvation. The queen will cease laying at once; all
unhatched brood will be ruthlessly torn from its
cradle-cells and destroyed; old, useless bees will be
expelled from the colony. And this is exactly what
will happen if the artificial food-supply is allowed to
fail even for the shortest period.

CHAPTER XVII

THE HONEY THIEVES

T1THERE the bee-garden lay, under its sheltering
crest of pine-wood, the April sunbeams
seemed to gather, as water gathers in the lap of
enclosing hills. Out in the lane the sweet hot wind
sang in the hedgerows, and the white dust lifted
under every footfall and went bowling merrily
away on the breeze. But once among the crowding
hives, you were launched on a still calm lake of
sunshine, where the daffodils hardly swayed on their
slender stems; and the smoke from the bee-master's
pipe, as he came down the red-tile'd path, hung in
the air behind him like blue gossamer spread to
catch the flying bees.

As usual, the old bee-man had an unexpected
answer ready to the most obvious question.

" When will the new honey begin to come in ? "he
said, repeating my inquiry. " Well, the truth is
honey never comes into the hives at all; it only
goes out. That's the old mistake people are always
falling into. Good bees never gather honey: they
leave that to the wicked ones. If I had a hive of
bees that took to honey-gathering, I should have to

126;

THE HONEY THIEVES 127

stop them, or end them altogether. It would have
to be either kill or cure."

He took a quiet whiff or two, enjoying the effect
of this seeming paradox, then went on to explain.

" What the bees gather from the flowers," said
he, "is no more honey than barley and hops are
beer. Honey has to be manufactured, first in the
body of the bee, and then in the comb-cells. It
must stand to brew in the heat of the hive, just as
the wort stands in the gyle-tun; and when it is
ready to be bunged down, before the bee adds the
last little plate of wax to the cell-capping, she turns
herself about and, as I believe, injects a drop of the
poison from her sting — or seems to do so. Then it
is real honey, but not before. Now, about these bad
bees, the honey-gatherers "

He stopped, putting his hand suddenly to his face.
A bee had unexpectedly fastened her sting into his
cheek. At the same moment another came at me
like a spent shot from a gun, and struck home on
my own face. The old bee-man took a hurried
survey of his hives.

" Why," said he, " as luck, or ill-luck, will have
it, I think I can show you the honey-gatherers at
work now. There's only one thing that would
make my bees wild on such a morning as this; and
we must find out where the trouble is, and stop it."

He was looking about him in every direction as
he spoke; and at last, on the farther side of the
bee-garden, seemed to make out something amiss.
As we passed between the long rows of bee-
dwellings every hive was the centre of its own
thronging busy life. From each there was a steady
stream of foragers setting outward into the brilliant

128 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

sunshine, and as constant a current homeward, as
the bees returned heavily weighed down under loads
of golden pollen from the willows by the neigh-
bouring riverside. But round the hive, near which
the bee-master presently came to a halt, there was
a very different scene enacting. The deep, rich note
of labour was replaced by an angry hubbub of war.
The alighting-board of the hive was covered with
fighting bees; company launched against company
single combats to the death; writhing masses of
bees locked together and tumbling furiously to the
ground in every direction. The soil about the hive
was already thickly strewn with the dead and dying :
and the air, for yards round, was filled with the
piercing note of the fray. It seemed as hopeless
to attempt to stop the carnage as it was manifestly
perilous to go near.

But the bee-master had his own short way with
this, as with most other difficulties. He took up a
big watering-can and filled it hastily from the butt
close by.

" This hive is a weak stock," he explained, " and
it is being robbed by one of the stronger ones.
That is always the danger in spring. We must try
to drive the robbers home, and only one thing will
do it. That is, a heavy rainstorm; and as there is
no chance of getting the real thing, we must make
one for ourselves."

He strode into the thick of the flying bees, and
raising the can above his head, sent a steady
cascade of water over the whole hive. The effect
was instantaneous. The fighting ceased at once.
The marauding bees rose on the wing and streamed
away homeward. Those belonging to the attacked

THE HONEY THIEVES 129

hive scrambled into its friendly shelter, a bedraggled,
sodden crew. When at length all was quiet, the
old bee-man fetched an armful of hay and heaped it
up before the hive, completely covering its entire
front.

" If the robbers come back," said he, " that will
stop them going in, while the bees inside can crawl
to and fro if they wish. But at sunset we must do
away with the stock altogether by uniting it to
another colony, and so put temptation out of the
robbers' way. And now we must go and look for
the robbers' den."

He refilled his pipe, and led the way down the
long thoroughfare of the bee-city, examining every
hive in turn as he passed.

" It is trouble of this kind," he said, " that does
more than anything else to upset the instinct-theory
of the old-fashioned naturalists, at least as far as
the honey-bee is concerned. Why should a whole
houseful of them suddenly break away from their
old orderly industrious habits, and take to thieving
and violence? But so it often happens. There is
character, or the want of it, among bees just as
there is in the human race. Some are gentle and
others vicious; some are hard workers early and
late, and others seem to take things easily, or to
be subject to unaccountable moods and caprices.
Then the weather has an extraordinary influence on
the temper of most hives. On sunny, calm days,
when the glass is ' set fair,' and the clover in full
bloom, the bees will take no notice of any inter-
ference. The hives can be opened and manipulated
without the slightest fear of a sting. But if the
glass is falling, or the wind rising and backing, the
I

130 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

bees will be often as spiteful as cats, and as timid
as squirrels. And there are times, just before a
storm, when to touch some hives would mean
bringing the whole population out upon you like a
nest of hornets."

He stopped by one of the hives, and laid his great
sunburnt hand down flat on the entrance-board.
The bees took no account of the obstacle, but ran
to and fro over his fingers with perfect unconcern.

" And yet," said he, " there are bees that follow
none of these general rules. Here is a stock which
it is almost impossible to ruffle. You may turn
their home inside out, and they will go on working
just as if nothing had happened. They are famous
honey-makers, while they keep to it; but, like all
mild-tempered bees, they are too fond of swarming,
and have to be put back into the hive two or three
times before they settle down to the season's
•work."

As he talked, he was looking about him carefully,
and at last made a short cut towards a hive stand-
ing a little apart from the rest. The bees of this
hive were behaving in a very different fashion from
those we had just inspected. They were running
about the flight-board in an agitated way, and the
whole hive gave out a note of deep unrest. The old
bee-man puffed his " smoker " up into full draught,
and set to work to open the hive.

" These are the honey thieves," he said, as he
pulled off the coverings of the hive and laid bare its
rumbling, seething interior to the searching sun-
light, " and when once bees have taken to robbing
their neighbours there is only one way to cure them.
You must exterminate the whole brood- In the old

THE HONEY THIEVES 131

days, a stock of bees with confirmed bad habits
would be taken to the sulphur-pit and settled at
once for good and all. But modern bee-keepers
have a better and less wasteful way. Now, look
out for the queen! "

He was lifting out the comb-frames one by one,
and subjecting them to a close examination. At
last, on one of the most crowded frames, he spied
the huge full-bodied queen, and lifted her off by
the wings. Then he closed the hive up again as
expeditiously as possible.

" Now," said he, as he ground the discredited
monarch under his heel, " we have stopped the mis-
chief at the fountain-head. Of course, if we left
the bees to raise another queen for themselves, she
would be of the same blood as the first one, and
her children would inherit the same undesirable
traits. But to-morrow, when the bees are thoroughly
sobered and frightened at the loss of their ruler,
we will give them another full-grown fertile queen
of the best blood in the apiary. In three weeks'
time the new population will begin to take over the
citadel; and in a month or two all the old bees will
have died off, and with them the last of the robber
taint."

CHAPTER XVIII

THE STORY OF THE SWARM

YXT HEN professional breeders of the honey-bee
have succeeded in producing the much-
desired non-swarming race, and swarming has
become a thing of the past, naturalists of the old
" instinct " school will be able to turn their backs
on at least one very inconvenient question.

There is no denying that the breeders are
theoretically right in their present efforts. The
swarming-habit in the honey-bee is admittedly the
main obstacle to large honey-takes; and now that
two of the principal objects of swarming — the
multiplication of stocks and renewal of queens — are
fairly well understood, and can be artificially effected,
there is no doubt that the universal adoption of a
non-swarming strain throughout the bee-farms of
the country, if such a thing were possible, would
result in a very greatly increased honey-yield, and
the people would get cheap honey. But at present
it is not easy to see that any progress whatever in
this direction has been made. The bees continue to
swarm, in spite of beautifully adjusted theories;
and the old attempt to fit the square peg ot instinct

132

THE STORY OF THE SWARM 133

into the round hole of fact goes on as merrily as
ever.

Students of bee-life, approaching the matter
unencumbered by ancient postulates, find themselves
face to face with many surprising things, which
would seem unexplainable on any other hypothesis
than that the bees are endowed with reason, and
that of no mean order.

Instinct implies invariability, a dead perfection of
motive, working blindly against all odds of circum-
stance, and always succeeding in the main. But the
very essence of reason, humanly speaking, is its
imperfection and continual deviation both in motive
and performance. Watching a swarm of bees from
the moment of its issue from the hive, the first thing
that strikes the unacademic observer is that most
of the bees seem to have no notion at all as to what
the furore is about. They are by no means the
obedient items of a common inexorable purpose.
They are more like a crowd of people running in a
street, all agog with excitement and curiosity, but
not one of them knowing the cause of the general
stampede. Sometimes a stock of bees will give
visible sign of the approach of a swarming-fit for
several days before the swarm actually issues.
But, as often as not, no such manifestation is given.
The hive, at least to the unexpert eye, seems in its
normal condition right up to the moment when the
great emigration takes place. And then, as at a
given signal, the work suddenly stops, and the bees
pour out of the hive-entrance in a living stream,
darkening the air for many yards round, the cloud
of darting bees rising higher and higher, and
spreading over a greater space with every

134 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

moment. The swarm may take three or four
minutes to get fairly on the wing; and, from a
populous hive, may number twenty-five or thirty
thousand individuals.

There is seldom any fear of stings at such a
time, and this extraordinary phase of bee-life may
usually be studied at close quarters. One of the
most puzzling things about it is that, however large
the swarm proves to be, enough workers and drones
are still left behind in the old hive to carry on the
work of the stock. When the order for the sally is
given, and a feverish excitement spreads at once
throughout the hive, those bees chosen to remain in
the old dwelling are perfectly unmoved by the
general mad spirit. Directly the last of the
trekking-party has gone off, the home-bees set
diligently and quietly to work as if nothing Had
happened. With the whole garden alive with
flashing wings, and resounding with the rich deep
hubbub of the swarm, the bees forming the remnant
of the old colony go about their usual business in
perfect unconcern, lancing straight off into the sun-
shine towards the clover-fields, or winging busily
homeward laden with honey and pollen, just as they
have been doing for weeks past. And if the hive be
opened at this time, it will show nothing unusual
except that no queen will be found. There will be
three or four queen-cells like elongated acorns
hanging from the edges of the central combs; and
the first queen to hatch out, and prove herself
happily mated, will be allowed to destroy all the
others. For the rest, work seems to be going on
in a perfectly normal way. The nectar and pollen
are being stored in the cells; the young grubs are

HIVING A SWARM

THE STORY OF THE SWARM 135

being fed; most of the combs are fairly well covered
with their busy population, consisting principally of
young bees, although a fair sprinkling of mature
workers and drones is everywhere visible. In eight
or ten days the new queen will be laying and the
colony rapidly regaining its former strength.

Meanwhile, the swarm is still in the air, every bee
careering hither and thither with no other apparent
purpose than that of allowing full vent to the mad
excitement which has so mysteriously seized upon
it. This state will often last a considerable time,
and, in rare cases, will end by the bees trooping
soberly back to the hive under just as mysterious
a revulsion of feeling and resuming their old steady
work. At other times the cloud of bees will suddenly
rise high into the air and go straight off across
country, disappearing in a few moments from the
keenest view. But generally, after a short spell of
this berserk frolic, the swarm seems gradually to
unite under common direction. The dark network
of flying bees overhead shrinks and grows denser.
At last you make out the beginnings of the cluster —
a mere handful of bees clinging to a branch in a
tree or bush. The handful swells at a wonderful
pace as the bees crowd towards it from all quarters.
In three or four minutes the whole multitude is
locked together in a solid pendent mass, and the
wild song of freedom has died down to a few stray
intermittent notes.

This silence, following the shrill, abounding
turmoil, has an almost uncanny effect. It seems so
utterly opposed to, and incongruous with, the mad
state of things that existed before; and it is difficult
to escape the conclusion that the bees have weakly

136 THE BEE-MASTER OE WARRILOW

given way to an incontrollable impulse against all
their principles and inherited traditions of right, and
that now, hanging thoroughly sobered and shamed
and disillusioned, homeless and beggared, tfiey
realise themselves face to face with the unforeseen
consequences of their thoughtless act. It is just
the conduct which might be expected of some savage
human race, pent up for long years in the rigid
bounds of an alien civilisation, which in one blind
moment has thrown to the four winds all its irksome
blessings, only to realise, when the first glowing
hour of freedom is over, that their long captivity
has made the old wild life no longer possible in fact.
Some such period of deep despondency as has come
to the silent swarm in the hedgerow can be imagined
as inevitably falling on such a race of men. But if
the conquerors were to follow the absconding tribe
into the lean wilderness and bring them home again
repentant, restoring them to their old shelter and
plenty once more, probably they would vent their
satisfaction in a chorus of joyful approval. And it
is just this which seems to be happening when the
swarm is shaken down in front of a new, well-
furnished hive. The first bees that find their way
into the cool dark interior set up a jubilant hum
unlike any other sound known in beecraft. At once
the strain is taken up by all the rest, and the whole
multitude marches into the new home to a tune
which the least fanciful must concede is nothing but
sheer satisfaction melodised.

There is little in all this which suggests a race of
creatures bound within the hard and fast laws of an
implanted instinct, which it is neither in their power
nor their pleasure to override. It is true that in the

THE STORY OF THE SWARM 137

natural life of the honey-bee this annually recurrent
impulse of swarming serves several necessary ends;
but the utilitarian argument, however stretched,
cannot be made to explain the whole fact. There
is unmistakably an element of caprice about it — a
kicking over the traces — which would be natural
enough in creatures possessed of reason, but totally
inconceivable from any other point of view. And
the farther we look into the whole problem the more
perplexing it seems. If we grant that the issue of a
swarm, from a hive overcrowded and headed by a
queen past her prime, is a necessity, why is it that
the same hive will often swarm a second and even a
third time until the stock is practically extinguished
and the original object of swarming wholly defeated ?
Or if, under the same conditions, a hive prepares
to swarm and cold windy weather intervenes,
how is it that frequently all idea of swarming is
abandoned for the season, although apparently the
necessity for it continues to exist ?

Creatures which pursue a certain line of conduct
under the blind promptings of instinct could hardly
be credited with intelligence enough to lead them to
seek another means for the desired end when the
preordained means has failed. But this is just what
the honey-bee appears to do in at least one instance.
If the mother-bee of a colony is getting past her
work, and she cannot be sent off with a swarm in the
usual way, the bees will supersede her. They will
deliberately put her to death, and raise another
queen to take her place. This State execution of
the old worn-out queens is one of the most curious
and pathetic things in or out of bee-life. One probe
with a sting would suffice in the matter; but the

138 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

honey-bee is a great stickler for the proprieties.
The royal victim must be allowed to meet her fate
in a royal way; and she is killed by caresses, tight-
locked in the joint embrace of the executioners
until suffocation brings about her death.

CHAPTER XIX

THE MIND IN THE HIVE

CTUDENTS of the ways of the honey-bee find
many things to marvel at, but little to excite their
wonder more than the unique system of ventilation
established in the hive.

Under natural conditions it is a moot point
whether bees concern themselves at all with the ven-
tilation of their nests. Wild bees usually fix upon
a site for their dwelling where there is ample space
for all possible developments; and the ventilation of
the home — as with most human tenements — is left
pretty much to chance causes. At least, in the course
of many years' observation, the writer has never seen
the fanners at work in the entrance of a natural bee-
settlement.

Probably this remarkable fanning system
originated in a new want felt by the bees, when, in
remote ages, their domestication began, and they
found themselves cooped up in impervious hives
which, in their very earliest form, were possibly
roughly-plaited baskets, daubed over with clay, or
earthen pots baked dry in the sun. This form,
originally adopted by the bee-keeper as a protection

iJ2

140 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

against honey-thieves of all sorts, as well as against
the weather, brought about a new order of things
in bee-life. The free circulation of air which would
obtain when the bee-colony was established naturally
in a cleft of a rock or in a hollow tree became no
longer possible. And so — as they have been proved
to have done in many modern instances — the bees
set to work to evolve new methods to meet new
necessities, and the present ventilation-system
gradually became an established habit of the
race.

Watching a hive of bees on any hot summer's
day, one very curious, not to say startling, fact
must strike the most superficial observer. If the
fanning bees were stationed round the flight-hole
in a merely casual, irregular way, their obvious
employment would be surprising enough. But it is
at once seen that each fanner forms part in an
ingenious and carefully thought-out plan. Out-
wardly, the fanners are arranged in regular rows,
one behind the other, all with their heads pointed
towards the hive, and all working their wings so
fast that their incessant movement becomes nearly
invisible. These rows of bees extend sometimes
for several inches over the alighting-board, and on
very hot days there may be as many as seven or
eight ranks. The ventilating army never covers the
whole available space. It is always at one side or
the other; or, where the entrance is a wide one, it
may be divided into two wings, leaving a centre
space free. The fanning bees, moreover, do not
keep close together, but stand in open order, so that
the continual coming and going of the nectar-
gatherers is in no wise impeded. There is a con-

THE MIND IN THE HIVE 141

stant flow of worker-bees through the ranks in both
directions; yet the fanning goes on uninterruptedly,
and, under certain conditions, the current of air
thus set up may be strong enough to blow out the
flame of a candle held at the edge of the flight-
board.

In all study of the ways of the honey-bee, the
safer plan is to begin with the assumption that a
reasoning creature is under observation, and then
to work back to the surer, well-beaten tracks of
thought concerning the lower creation — that is, if
the observed facts warrant it. But this question of
the ventilation of the modern beehive — only one of
many other problems equally astounding — helps
the orthodox naturalist of the old school very little
on his comfortable way. We know that the wild
bee generally chooses a situation for her nest which
is neither cramped nor confined, but has in most
cases ample space available for the future growth of
the colony. Security from storm or flood seems to
be the first consideration. The fact that the interior
of a bee-nest is more or less in darkness appears to
be mainly accidental. Bees have no particular lik-
ing for absolute darkness, nor, in fact, is any hive
perfectly free from light. Experiment will prove
that a very small aperture is sufficient to admit a
considerable amount of reflected and diffused light,
quite enough for the needs of the hive. It may be
supposed, therefore, that the bees would have no
objection to building in broad daylight, or even
sunlight, if, in conjunction with the first necessities
of shelter, security, and equable temperature, such
a location were easily obtainable under natural
conditions. It would only be another instance of

142 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

their unique adaptability to circumstances forced upon
them.

In the matter of ventilation, however, they seem
to make a very determined and highly successful
stand against imposed conditions. Bee-keeping
cannot be made a profitable occupation unless the
work of the bees is kept strictly within certain
sharply-defined limits, and probably the modern
movable comb hive is the best means to this end.
That it leaves the necessity of ventilation wholly
unprovided for is not the fault of the bee-master,
but of the bees themselves. They refuse point-
blank to have anything to do with human notions
of hygiene. Many devices have been tried, in the
form of vent-shafts and the like, to carry off the
vitiated air of the hive, but all have failed, because
the bees insist on stopping up every crack or crevice
left in walls, roof, or floor. For some inscrutable
reason they will have only the one opening, which
must serve for all purposes, and the hive-maker has
had to learn by hard-won experience that the bees
are right.

Perhaps, in any attempt to follow the reasoning
of the bees in this matter, it is well first of all to
get rid of the word " fanning " altogether. The
wing-action of the ventilating bees is more that of
a screw-propeller than a fan. The air is not beaten
to and fro, as a fan would beat it, but is driven
backwards, and thus the ventilating squadron on
the flight-board really sets up an exhaust-current,
which draws the contaminated air out of the hive.
This implies an equally strong current of fresh air
passing into the hive, and explains why the bees
work at the side of the entrance only, the central,

THE MIND IN THE HIVE 143

unoccupied space being obviously the course of the
intake. Thus the bees' system of ventilation can be
described as a swiftly-flowing loop of air, having
both extremities outside the hive, much as a rope
moves over a pulley, and it can be readily under-
stood that any supplementary inlet or outlet — such
as the bee-master would instal, if he were permitted
— would be rather a hindrance to the system than a
help. Probably the actual main current keeps to
the walls of the hive throughout, the ventilation
between the brood-combs being more slowly
effected. This would fulfil a double purpose. The
air supplied to the central portion, or brood-nest
proper, would be thoroughly warmed before it
reached the young larvae, while the outer and upper
combs, where the stores of new honey are maturing,
would lie in the full stream.

It must be remembered that a constant supply
of fresh air of the right temperature is as necessary
for the brewing honey as it is for the bees and
young brood. The nectar, as gathered from the
flowers, needs to be deprived of the greater part of
its moisture before it becomes honey. Thus, in the
course of the season, many gallons of water must
pass out of the hive in the form of vapour, and the
removal of this water constitutes an important part
of the work of the ventilating army. Here, again,
the wisdom of the bees in insisting on a mechanical,
as opposed to an automatic, system of air-renewal,
becomes evident. If the warm, moisture-laden air
were left to discharge itself from the hive by its
own buoyancy, condensation of this moisture would
take place on the cooler surfaces of the hive-walls,
and the lower regions of the hive would speedily

144 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

become a quagmire. But by setting up a mechani-
cally-driven current the air is drawn out before
condensation can take place, and thus, in one
operation, forming a veritable triumph in economics,
the hive interior is rendered both dry and salutary,
while its temperature is sustained at the necessary
hatching-point for the young brood.

A reflection which will occur to most thinking
minds is, why should the domesticated honey-bee
be constrained to resort to all these devices, when
the wild bee seems to lead a happy-go-lucky
existence, comparatively free, so far as we know,
from such complicated cares ? The answer to this
is that the science of apiculture has wrought a
change in the bees' normal environment which is
probably without parallel in the whole history of the
domestication of the lower creatures. In a modern
hive the honey-bee lives on a vastly elaborated scale,
and the ancient rules of bee-life are no longer
applicable. Much the same sort of thing has
happened as in the case of a village which has
grown to a city. It is useless to deal with the new
order of things as a mere question of arithmetic.
Abnormal growth in a community involves change
not only in scale but in principle; and it is the same
with a hive of bees as with a hive of men.

CHAPTER XX

THE KING'S BEE-MASTER

CTUDENTS of old books on the honey-bee — and
perhaps there has been more written about bees
during the last two thousand years than of all other
creatures put together — do not quite know what
to make of Moses Rusden, who was Charles the
Second's bee-master, and wrote his " Further
Discovery of Bees " in the year 1679. The wonder
about Rusden is that obviously he knew so much
that was true about bee-life, and yet seems, of set
purpose, to have imparted so little. He was a
shrewdly observant man, of lifelong experience in
his craft. His system of bee-keeping would not
have disgraced many an apiculturist of the present
time, often yielding him a honey harvest averaging
sixty pounds to the hive, which is a result not
always achieved even by our foremost apiarian
scientists. His hives were fitted with glass
windows, through which he was continually study-
ing his bees. He must have had endless oppor-
tunities of proving the fallacy and folly of the ancient
classic notions as to bee-life. And yet we find him
K MS

146 ' THE BEE-MASTER OF. WARRILOW

gravely upholding almost the entire framework of
fantastic error, old even in Pliny's time; and
speaking of the king-bee with his generals, captains,
and retinue, honey that was a dew divinely sent
down from heaven, the miraculous propagation of
bee-kind from the flowers, and all the other curious
myths and fables handed down from writer to writer
since the very earliest days.

But, reading on in the little time-stained, worm-
eaten book, it is not very difficult to guess at last
why Rusden adopted this attitude. He was the
King's bee-master, and therefore a courtier first
and a naturalist afterwards. In the first flush of the
Restoration, anyone who had anything to say in
support of the divine right of kings was certain to
catch the Royal eye. Rusden admits himself con-
versant with Butler's " Feminine Monarchie,"
published some fifty years before, in which the
writer argues that the single great bee in a hive was
really a female. To a man of Rusden's practical
experience and deductive quality of mind, this state-
ment must have lead, and no doubt did lead, to all
sorts of speculations and discoveries. But with a
ruler of Charles the Second's temperament, feminine
monarchies were not to be thought of. Rusden
saw at once his restrictions and his peculiar oppor-
tunity, and wrote his book on bees, which is really
an ingenious attempt to show that the system of a
self-ruling commonwealth is a violation of nature,
and that, whether for bees or men, government
under a king is the divinely ordained state.

Whether, however, Rusden was deliberately
insincere, or actually succeeded in blinding himself

THE KING'S BEE-MASTER 147

conveniently for his own purposes, it must be
admitted not only that he argued the case with
singular adroitness, But that never did facts adapt
themselves so readily to either conscious or
unconscious misrepresentation. In the glass-
windowed hives of the Royal bee-house at Saint
James's, he was able to show the King a nation of
creatures .evidently united under a common rule,
labouring together in harmony and producing works
little short of miraculous to the mediaeval eye. He
saw that these creatures were of two sorts, each
going about its duty after its kind, but that in each
colony there was one bee, and only one, which
differed entirely from the rest. To this single large
bee all the others paid the greatest deference. It
was cared for and nourished, and attended assidu-
ously in its progress over the combs. All the
humanly approved tokens of royalty were manifest
about it. No wonder the King's bee-master was
not slow in recognising that, in those troublous
times, he could do his patron no greater service
than by pointing out to the superstitious and
ignorant multitude — still looking askance at the
restored monarchy — such indisputable evidence in
nature of Charles's parallel right.

And perhaps nature has never been at such pains
to conceal her true processes from the vulgar eye
as in this case of the honey-bee. If Rusden ever
suspected that the one large bee in each colony was
really the mother of all the rest, and had set himself
to prove it, he would have found the whole array
of visible facts in opposition to him. If ever a truth
seemed established beyond all reasonable doubt, it

148 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

was that the ordinary male-and-female principle,
pertaining throughout the rest of creation, was
abrogated in the single instance of the honey-bee.
The ancients explained this anomaly as a special
gift from the gods, and the bees were supposed to
discover the germs of bee-life in certain kinds of
flowers and to bring them home to the cells for
development. Rusden improved upon this idea by
assigning to his king-bee the duty of fertilising
these embryos when they were placed in the cells,
for he could not otherwise explain a fact of which
he was perfectly well aware — that the large bee
travelled the combs unceasingly, thrusting its body
into each cell in turn. Rusden also held that the
worker-bees were females, but only — as Freemasons
would say — in a speculative manner. They neither
laid eggs nor bore young. Their maternal duties
consisted only in gathering the essence of bee-life
from the blossoms and nursing and tending the
young bees when they emerged from their cradle-
cells. The drones were a great difficulty to Rusden.
To admit them to be males — as some held even in
his day — would have been against the declared
object of his book, as tending to entrench upon
royal prerogatives. Luckily, this truth was as easy
of apparent refutation as all the rest. No one had
ever detected any traffic of the sexes amongst bees
either in or out of the hives; nor, indeed, is such
detection possible. The fact that the queen-bee has
concourse with the drone only once in her whole
life, and that their meeting takes place in the upper
air far out of reach of human observation, is know-
ledge only of yesterday. In Rusden's time such a

THE KING'S BEE-MASTER 149

marvel was never even suspected. As the drones,
therefore, were never seen to approach the worker
bees or to notice them in any way, and as also young
bees were bred in the hives during many months
when no drones existed at all, Rusden's ingenuity
was equal to the task of bringing them into line
with his theory.

If he had lived a few decades earlier, and it had
been Cromwell, instead of the heartless, middle-aged
rake of a sovereign, whom he had to propitiate, no
doubt Rusden would have asked his public to
swallow Pliny's whole apiarian philosophy at a
gulp. Bee-life would then have been held up as a
foreshadowing of celestial conditions, and the facts
would have lent themselves to this view equally as
well. But his task was to represent the economy
of the hive as a clear proof of divine authority in
kingship, and it must be conceded that, as far as
knowledge went in those days, he established his
case.

His book was published under the aegis of the
Royal Society, and " by his Majestie's especial
Command," which was less a testimony of the
King's love for natural history than of his political
astuteness. Apart, however, from its peculiar
mission, the book is interesting as a sidelight on
the old bee-masters and their ways. Probably it
represents very fairly the extent of knowledge at
the time, which had evidently advanced very little
since the days of Virgil. Rusden taught, with the
ancients, that honey was a secretion from the stars,
and that wax was gathered from the flowers, as well
as the generative matter before mentioned. He had

150 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

one theory which seems to have been essentially his
own. The little lumps of many-coloured pollen,
which the worker-bees fetch home so industriously
in the breeding season, he held to be the actual
substance of the young bees to come, in an
elementary state. These, he tells us, were placed
in the cells, having absorbed the feminine virtues
from their bearers on the way. The king-bee then
visited each in turn, vivifying them with his essence,
after which they had nothing to do but grow into
perfect bees. He got over the difficulty of the
varying sexes of the bees bred in a hive by asserting
that these lumps of animable matter were created
in the flowers, either female, or neuter — as he
called the drones — or royal, as the case might be.
Having denied the drones any part in the production
of their species, or in furnishing the needs of the
hive, Rusden was hard put to it to find a use for
them in a system where it would have been Ikse-
majeste to suppose anything superfluous or amiss.
He therefore hits upon an idea which, curiously
enough, embodies matter still under dispute at the
present time, although it is being slowly recognised
as a truth. Rusden says the use of the drones is to
take the place of the other bees in the hive when
these are mostly away honey-gathering. Their
great bodies act as so many warming stoves,
supplying the necessary heat to the hatching embryos
and the maturing stores of honey. It is well
known that drones gather together side by side,
principally in the remoter parts of the hive, often
completely covering these outer combs. They
seldom rouse from their lethargy of repletion to

THE KING'S BEE-MASTER 151

take their daily flight until about midday, when most
of the ingathering work is over, and the hive is
again fairly populous with worker-bees. Probably,
therefore, Rusden was quite right in his theory,
which, hundreds of years after, is only just
beginning to be accepted as a fact.

CHAPTER XXI

POLLEN AND THE BEE

"POPULAR beliefs as to the ways of the honey-
bee, unlike those relating to many other insects,
are surprisingly accurate, so far as they go. But,
dealing with such a complex thing as hive-life, it is
well-nigh impossible to have understanding on any
single point without going very much farther than
the ordinary tabloid-method of knowledge can carry
us. This is especially true with regard to pollen,
and the uses to which it is put within the hive. The
hand-books on bee-keeping usually tell us that pollen
is employed with honey as food for the young bees
when in the larval state; but this is so wide a
generalisation that it amounts to almost positive
error. As a matter of fact, the pollen in its raw
condition is given only to the drone-larva, and this
only towards the end of its life as a grub. For the
first three days of the drone-larva's existence, and
in the case of the young worker-bee for the whole
five days of the larval period, the pollen is
administered by the nurse-bees in a pre-digested
state. After partial assimilation, both the pollen
and the nectar are regurgitated by these nurse-bees,

152

POLLEN AND THE BEE 153

and form together a pearly-white fluid — veritable bee-
milk — on which the young grubs thrive in an extra-
ordinary way.

There are few things more fascinating than to
watch a hive of bees at work on a fine June morning,
and to note how the pollen is carried in. With a
prosperous stock, thousands of bees must pass within
the space of a few minutes, each bee dragging behind
her a double load of this substance. Very often, in
addition to the half-globes of pollen which she carries
on her thighs, the bee will be smothered in it from
head to foot, as in gold-dust. If you track her into
the hive, one curious point will be noted. No
matter how fast she may go, or what frantic spirit
of labour may possess the entire colony, the pollen-
laden bee is never in a hurry to get rid of her load.
She will waste precious time wandering over the
crowded combs, continually shaking herself, as
though showing off her finery to her admiring
relatives; and it may be some minutes before she
finally selects a half-filled pollen-cell and proceeds
to kick off her load. The different kinds of pollen
are packed into the cells indiscriminately, the bee
using her head as a ram to press each pellet home.
When the cell is full it is never sealed over with a
waxen capping, as in the case of the honey-stores,
but is left open or covered with a thin film of honey,
apparently to preserve it from the air. The nurse-
bees, who are the young workers under a fortnight
old, help themselves from these pollen-bins. They
also frequently stop a pollen-bearer as she hurries
through the crowd, and nibble the pollen from her
thighs.

Throughout the season there is hardly an

154 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRlLOW

imaginable colour or shade of colour which is not
represented in the pollen carried into a beehive;
and with the aid of a microsope it is not difficult to
identify the source of each kind. In May, before
the great field-crops have come into bloom, the
pollen is almost entirely gathered from wild flowers,
and consists of various rich shades of yellow and
brown. By far the heaviest burdens at this time
are obtained from the dandelion. The pollen from
this flower is a peculiarly bright orange, and is
easily recognised under a strong glass by its grains,
which are in the form of regular dodecahedrons,
thickly covered all over with short spikes.

It is well known that the honey-bee confines
herself during each journey to one species of flower,
and this is proved by the microscope. It is not
easy to intercept a homing bee laden with pollen.
On alighting before the hive she runs in so quickly
that the keenest eye and deftest hand are necessary
to effect her capture. But with the aid of a
miniature butterfly-net and a little practice it can
generally be done; and then the pellet of pollen will
be found to consist almost invariably of one kind of
grain. But it is not always so. The honey-bee,
as a reasoning creature, does not and cannot be
expected to do anything invariably. Among some
hundreds of these pollen-lumps examined under the
microscope I have occasionally found grains of
pollen differing from the bulk. Perhaps there are
no two species of flower which have pollen-grains
exactly alike in colour, shape, and size, and in most
the differences are very striking. In the cases
mentioned the bulk of the pollen was made up of
long oval yellow grains divided lengthwise into

POLLEN AND THE BEE 155

three lobes or gores, which were easily identifiable
as coming from the figwort. The isolated grains
were very minute spheres thickly studded with
blunt spikes — obviously from the daisy. The figwort
is a famous source of bee-provender in spring
time, and its pollen can be seen flowing into the
hives at that time in an almost unbroken stream of
brilliant chrome-yellow. The brownish-gold masses
that are also being constantly carried in are from
the willow; and where the hives are near wood-
lands the bluebells yield the bees enormous
quantities of pollen of a dull yellowish white.

It is interesting that all these various materials,
so carefully kept asunder when gathered, are for
the most part inextricably mingled within the hive.
Obviously the systeni of visiting only one species
of flower on each foraging journey can have no
relation to pollen-gathering; nor does it seem to
apply to the nectar obtained at the same time. It
cannot be inferred that the contents of each honey-
cell are brewed from only one source, because it has
been proved that bees do blend the various nectars
together when several crops are simultaneously in
flower. A honey-judge can easily detect the flavours
of heather and white-clover in the same sample of
honey by taste alone. But there is another and
much more conclusive way of deciding the source
from which a particular sample of honey has been
obtained. In the purest and most mature honeys
there are always a few accidental grains of pollen,
invisible to the eye, yet easily detected under a
strong glass. And these may be taken as almost
infallible guides to the species of flowers visited by
the foraging bees. The only explanation which

156 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

seems possible, therefore, of the honey-bee's care to
visit only one kind of blossom on each journey
is that it is done for the sake of the plant itself,
cross-fertilisation being thus rendered extremely
improbable.

When once the bee-man has succumbed to the
fascination of the microscope, there is very little
chance that he will ever return to his old panoramic
view of things. He goes on from wonder to wonder,
and the horizon of the new world he has entered
continually broadens with each marvelling step.
To the old rule-of-thumb bee-keepers pollen was
mere bee-bread; and the fact that the bees preferred
one kind to another did not greatly concern them.
But at a time when the small-holder is beginning
to feel his feet, and the question of the feasibility of
planting for bee-forage is certain to arise, it is
necessary to know why bees gather this important
part of their diet from particular kinds of flowers,
while leaving severely alone others which appear
to be equally attractive. To this question the micro-
scope supplies a sufficient answer.

Chemists have determined that nectar is the heat
and force-producer in the food of the bee, while
pollen supplies its nitrogenous tissue-building
qualities. It is evident that bees select certain
pollens for their superior nutritive powers, just as
in bread-making we prefer wheat to any other
species of grain. In the kinds of pollen most in
favour with bees a good microscope will reveal the
fact that the pollen-grains are often accompanied
by a certain amount of true farina, as well as
essential oils, which must greatly enhance their food-
value. And in those crops generally neglected by

POLLEN AND THE BEE 157

bees, such as daisies and buttercups, those accom-
paniments appear to be absent. The dandelion is
especially rich in a thick yellow oil, which the bees
carry away with the pollen; while two plants in
particular of which the bees are especially fond —
the crocus and the box — have a large amount of this
farina mingled with the true pollen.

It is only within the last century or so that the
real uses of pollen in the economy of the hive have
been ascertained. Until comparatively recent times
the pollen was supposed to be crude wax, which the
bees refined and purified into the white ductile
material of the new combs; and a few old-fashioned
bee-keepers still hold this view, and refuse to believe
that the wax used in comb-building is entirely a
secretion from the bee's own body. Pollen, indeed,
seems to have very little to do with wax, hardly any
nitrogenous food being consumed while the wax is
being generated.

CHAPTER XXII

THE HONEY-FLOW

/"\N Warrilow Bee-Farm, where it lay under the
green lip of the Sussex Downs, there was
always food for wonder, whether the year was at
its ebb or its flow. But in July of a good season
the busy life of the farm reached a culminating
point.

The ordinary man, in search of excitement,
distraction, the heady wine served out only to those
who stand in the fighting-line of the world, would
hardly seek these things in a little sleepy village sunk
fathoms deep in English summer greenery. But,
nevertheless, with the coming of the great honey-
flow to Warrilow came all these subtle human
necessities. If you would keep up with the bee-
master and his men at this stirring time, you must
be ready for a break-neck gallop from dawn to dusk
of the working day, and often a working night to
follow. While the honey-flow endured, muscles and
nerves were tried to their breaking-point. It was
a race between the great centrifugal honey-extractor
and the toiling millions of the hives; and time and
again, in exceptionally favourable seasons, the bees

158

THE HONEY-FLOW 159

would win; the honey-chambers would clog with
the interminable sweets, and the dreaded atrophy
of contentment would seize upon the best of the
hives, with the result that they would gather no
more honey.

A week of hot bright days and warm still nights,
with here and there a gentle shower to hearten the
fields of clover and sainfoin; and then the fight
between the bee-master and his millions would begin
in earnest. There would be no more quiet pipes,
strolling and talking among the hives : the Bee-
Master of Warrilow was a general now, with all
a great commander's stern absorption in the conduct
of a difficult campaign. Often, with the first grey
of the summer's morning, you would hear his
footsteps on the red-tiled path of the garden below,
as he hurried off to the bee-farm, and presently the
bell in the little turret over the extracting-house
would clang out a reveille to his men, and draw
them from their beds in the neighbouring village
to another day of work, perhaps the most trying
work by which men win their bread.

It is nothing in the ordinary way to lift a super-
chamber weighing twenty pounds or so. But to
lift it by imperceptible degrees, place an empty rack
in its place, return the full rack to the hive as an
upper story, and to do it all so quietly and gently
that the bees have not realised the onslaught on
their home until the operation is complete, is quite
another thing. And a long day of this wary,
delicate handling of heavy weights, at arm's length,
under broiling sunshine, is one of the most nerve-
wearing and back-breaking experiences in the
world.

160 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

One of the mistakes made by the unknowing in
bee-craft is that the bee-veil is never used among
professional men. But the truth is that even the
oldest, most experienced hand is glad enough, at
times, to fall back behind this, his last line of defence.
All depends upon the momentary temper of the
bees. There are times when every hive on the
farm is as gentle as a flock of sheep, and it is
possible to take any liberty with them. At other
times, and apparently under much the same
conditions, stocks of bees with the steadiest of
reputations will resent the slightest interference,
while the mere approach to others may mean a
furious attack. No true bee-man is afraid of the
wickedest bees that ever flew, but it is only the
novice who will disdain necessary precautions.
Even the Bee-Master of Warrilow was seldom
seen without a wisp of black net round the crown
of his ancient hat, ready to be let down at a moment's
notice if the bees showed any inclination to sting.

In a long vista of memorable days spent at
Warrilow, one stands out clear above all the rest.
It was in July of a famous honey-year. The hay
had long been carried, and the second crops of
sainfoin and Dutch clover were making their
bravest show of blossom in the fields. It was a
stifling day of naked light and heat, with a fierce
wind abroad hotter even than the sunshine. The
deep blue of the sky came right down to the earth-
line. The farthest hills were hard and bright under
the universal glare. And on the bee-farm, as I
came through the gap in the dusty hedgerow, I
saw that every man had his veil close drawn down.
The bee-master hailed me from his crowded corner.

THE HONEY-FLOW 161

" Y'are just to the nick!" he called, in his
broadest Sussex. " 'Tis stripping-day wi' us, an' I
can do wi' a dozen o' ye ! Get on your veil, d'rectly-
minute, an' wire in t'ot!"

The fierce hot wind surged through the little city
of hives, scattering the bees like chaff in all
directions, and rousing in them a wild-cat fury.
Overhead the sunny air was full of bees, striving
out and home; and from every hive there came a
shrill note, a tremulous, high-pitched roar of work,
half-baffled,, driven through against all odds and
hindrances, a note that bore in upon you an
irresistible sense of fear. I pulled on the bee-veil
without more ado.

" Stripping-day " was always the hardest day of
the year at Warrilow. It meant that some infallible
sign of the approaching end of the harvest had been
observed, and that all extractable honey must be
immediately removed from the hives. A change of
weather was brewing, as the nearness of the hills
foretold. There might be weeks of flood and
tempest coming, when the hives could not be opened.
Overnight there had been a ringed moon, and the
morning broke hot and boisterous, with an ominous
clearness everywhere. By midday the glass was
tumbling down. The bee-master took one look at
it, then called all hands together. " Strip ! " he
said laconically; and all work in extracting-house
and packing-sheds was abandoned, and every man
braced himself to the job.

The hives were arranged in long double rows,
back to back, with a footway between wide enough
to allow the passage of the honey barrow. This
was not unlike a baker's hand-cart, and contained

L

1 62 THE BEE-MASTER OF. WARRILOW

empty combs, which were to be exchanged for the
full combs from the hives. I found myself sharing
a row with the bee-master, and already infused with
the glowing, static energy for which he was re-
nowned. The process of stripping the hives varied
little with each colony, but the bees themselves
furnished variety enough and to spare. In working
for comb-honey, the racks or sections are tiered up
one above the other until as many as five stories
may be built over a good stock. But where the
honey is to be extracted from the comb another
system is followed. There is then only one super-
chamber, holding ten frames side by side, and these
frames are removed separately as fast as the bees
fill and seal them, their place being taken by the
empty combs extracted the day before.

The whole art of this work consists in disturbing
the bees as little as possible. At ordinary times
the roof of the hive is removed, the " quilts " which
cover the comb-frames are then very gently peeled
away, and the frames with their adhering bees are
placed side by side in the clearing-box. The honey-
chamber is then furnished with empty combs, and
the coverings and roof replaced. On nine days out
of ten this can be done without a veil or any
subduing contrivance; and the bees which were
shut up with the honey in the clearing-box will
soon come out through the traps in the lid and fly
back to their hives. But when time presses, and
several hundred hives must be gone through in a
few hours, a different system is adopted. Speed is
now a main desideratum in the work, and on
stripping-day at Warrilow resort is made to a
contrivance seldom seen there at other times. This

THE HONEY-FLOW 163

is simply a square of cloth saturated with weak
carbolic acid, the most detested, loathsome thing
in bee-comity. Directly the comb-frames are laid
bare these cloths are drawn over them, and in a
few moments every bee has crowded down terror-
stricken into the lower regions of the hive, leaving
the honey-chamber free for instant and swift
manipulation.

CHAPTER XXIII

SUMMER LIFE IN A BEE-HIVE

TF you go to the bee-garden early of a fine
summer's morning you will be struck by the
singular quiet of the place. All the woods and
hedgerows are ringing with busy life. The rooks
are cawing homeward with already hours of
strenuous work behind them. The cattle in the
meadows are well through their first cud. But as
yet the bee-city is as still as the sleeping village
around it. Now and again a bee drops down from
the sky on a deserted hive-threshold with sleepy
hum, and runs past the guards at the gate. But
these are bees that have wandered too far afield
overnight, tempted by the sunny warmth of the
evening. The dusk has caught them, and oblit-
erated their flying-marks. They have perforce
camped out under some broad leaf, to be wakened
by the earliest light of morning and hurry home
with their belated loads.

The sun is well up over the hillbrow before the
visible life of the bee-garden begins to rouse in
earnest. The water-seekers are the first to appear,

164

SUMMER LIFE IN A BEE-HIVE 165

Every hive has its traditional dipping-place,
generally the oozy margin of some neighbouring
pond, where the house-martins have been wheeling
and crying since the first grey of dawn. Now the
bees' clear undertone begins to mingle with the
chippering chorus. In a little while there is a thin
straight line of humming music stretched between
the hives and the pond : it could not be straighter
if a surveyor had made it with his level. Again a
little while, and this long searchlight of melody
thrown out by the bee-garden veers to the north.
You may track it straight over copse and meadow,
seeing not a bee overhead, but guided unerringly
by the arrow-flight of music, until, on the far hill-
side, it is lost in a perfect roar of sound. Here the
white-clover is in almost full blossom again : in
southern England at least it is always the second
crop of clover that yields the most plentiful harvest
to the hives.

It must be a disturbing thing to those kinder-
garten moralists who hold the bee up to youth for
an example of industry and prudence to learn that
she is by no means an early riser; though, at this
time of year, she is undoubtedly both wealthy and
wise. For it is her very wisdom that now makes
her a lie-abed. When the iron is hot, she will not
be slow in striking. But it is nectar, not dewdrops,
from which she makes her honey. Very wisely
she waits until the sun has drunk up the dew from
the clover-bells, and then she hurries forth to
garner their undiluted sweets. Even then, perhaps,
three-fourths of her burden will be carried uselessly.
In the brewing-vats of the hive the nectar must
stand and steam until three parts of its original

166 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

bulk has evaporated, and its sugar has been inverted
into grape-sugar. Then it is honey, but not before.
When we see the fanning-army at work by the
entrance of a hive, it is not alone an undoubted
passion for pure air that moves the bees to such
ingenious activity. In the height of the honey
season many pints of vaporised liquid must be given
off by the maturing stores in the course of a day
and night, and all this water must be got rid of.
Herein is shown the wisdom of the bee-master who
makes the walls of his hives of a material that is a
bad conductor of heat. It is a first necessity of
health to the bees that the moisture in the air, which
they are incessantly fanning out at this time, should
not condense until it is safely wafted from the
hive. A cold-walled hive can easily become a
quagmire.

The bee-garden is quiet now in the sweet virgin
light of the summer's morning; but the thought of
it as containing so many houses of sleep, true of
the village with its thatched human dwellings,
could not well be farther from the truth in regard
to the village of hives. There is little sleep in a
bee-hive in summer. Of any common period of
rest, of any quiet night when all but the sentinels
at the gate are slumbering, of any general time of
relaxation, there is absolutely none. Each in-
dividual bee — forager or nurse, comb-builder or
storekeeper — works until she can work no more, and
then stops by the way, or crawls into the nearest
empty cell for a brief siesta. But the life of the
hive itself never halts, never wavers in summer-
time, night or day. Go to it morning, noon, or
night in the hot July season, and you will always

SUMMER LIFE IN A BEE-HIVE 167

find it driving onward unremittingly. The crowd is
surging to and fro. There is ever the busy deep
labour-note. Its people are building, brewing,
wax-making, scavenging, wet-nursing, being born
and dying : it is all going on without pause or break
inside those four reverberating walls, while you
stand without in the dew-soaked grass and level
sunbeams wondering how it is that all the world
can be at full flood-tide of merry life and music
while these mysterious hive people give scarce a
sign.

It is at night chiefly that the combs are built.
The wax, that is a secretion from the bees' own
bodies, will generate only under great heat, and
the temperature of the hive is naturally greatest
when all the family is at home. In the night also
such works as transferring a large mass of honey
from one comb to another are undertaken. It is
curious to note that at night time the drones get
together in the remotest parts of the hive, apparently
to keep up the heat in these distant quarters, which
are away from the main cluster of worker-bees.
There is hardly another thing in creation, perhaps,
with a worse name than the drone-bee. But like
all bad things he is not so bad as he is represented.
Apart from his main and obvious use, the drone
fulfils at least one very important office. His habit
is not to leave his snug corner until close upon
midday. Thus, when every able-bodied worker
bee is out foraging, the temperature of the
hive is sustained by the presence of the drones,
and the young bee-brood is in no danger of
chilling.

Though the supreme direction of all affairs in a

168 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

bee-hive falls to the lot of the worker-bees, the
queen-mother is second to none in industry. At this
time of year she goes about her task with a dogged
patience and assiduity pathetic to witness. She may
have to supply from two thousand to three thousand
brood-cells with eggs in the course of a single day,
and she is for ever wandering through the crowded
corridors of the hive looking for empty cradles.
The old bee-masters believed that the queen was
always accompanied in these unending promenades
by exactly a dozen bees, whom they called the
Twelve Apostles. It is true that whenever the
queen stops in her march she is immediately
surrounded by a number of bees, who form them-
selves into a ring, keeping their heads ceremoniously
towards her. But close observation reveals the
fact that the queen-bee is never followed about by a
permanent retinue. When she moves to go on, the
ring breaks and disperses before her; but the bees
who gather round her on her next halt are those who
happen to occupy the space of comb she has then
reached.

The truth seems to be that she is passed from
" hand to hand " over the combs of the brood-nest,
and is stopped wherever a cell requires replenishing.
Each bee that she encounters on her path turns
front and touches her gently with her antennae.
The queen constantly returns these salutes as she
moves, and it looks exactly as if she were going the
rounds of her domain and collecting information.
Often she is stopped by half a dozen bees in a solid
phalanx, and carefully headed off in a new direction.
She looks into every cell as she goes, and when she
has lowered her body into a cell, the Apostles

SUMMER LIFE IN A BEE-HIVE 169

instantly gather about her, with strokings and
caresses. But their number is seldom twelve. It
varies according to the bulk and length of the
queen herself, and is more often sixteen than a
dozen.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE YELLOW PERIL IN HIVELAND

TX the hedgerow that surrounds the bee-garden
the wrens and robins have been singing all the
morning long. Still a few pale sulphur buds remain
on the evening-primroses. The balsams make a
glowing patch of majenta by the garden gate.
Over the door porch of the old thatched cottage
purple clematis climbs bravely; and the nasturtiums
still flaunt their scarlet and gold in the sunny angle
of the wall. But, for all the colour and the music,
the hot sun, and the serene blue air overhead, you
can never forget that it is October. If the towering
elm-trees by the lane-side showed no fretting of
amber in their greenery, nor the beeches sent down
their steady rain of russet, there would still be one
indubitable mark of the season — the voice of the
hives themselves.

Rich and wavering and low in the sweet autumn
sunlight, it comes over to you now with the very
spirit of rest in every halting tone. There is work,
of a kind, doing in the bee-garden. A steady tide
of bees is stemming out from and home to every
hive. But there is none of the press and busy

170

THE YELLOW PERIL IN HIVELAND 171

clamour of bygone summer days. It is only a
make-believe of duty. Each bee, as she swings up
into the sunshine, hovers a while before setting
easy sail for the ivy in the lane; and, on returning,
she may bask for whole minutes together on the
hot hive-roof. There is no sort of hurry; little
as there may be to do abroad, there is less at
home.

But to one section of the bee-community, these
slack October hours bring no cessation of toil. The
guards at the gate must redouble their vigilance.
Cut off from most of their natural supplies, the yellow
pirates — the wasps — are continually prowling about
the entrance; and, in these lean times, will dare all
dangers for a fill of honey. Incessant fierce skir-
mishes take place on the alighting-board. The
guards hurl themselves at each adventuress in turn.
The wasp, calculating coward that she is, invariably
declines battle, and makes off; but only to return a
little later, hoping for the unwary moment that is
sure to come. While the whole strength of the
picket is engaged with other would-be pilferers, she
slips round the scuffling crew, and plunges into the
fragrant gloom of the hive.

The variation in temperament among the mem-
bers of a bee-colony is never better illustrated than
by the way in which these marauders are received
and dealt with. The wasp never tries to pick a way
to the honey-stores through the close packed ranks
of the bees. She keeps to the sides of the hive, and
works her way up by a series of quick darts when-
ever a path opens before her. Evidently her plan
is to avoid contact with the home-keeping bees,
which, at this time of year, have little more to do

172 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

than loiter over the combs, or tuck themselves away
in the empty brood-cells by the hour together. But
in her desultory advance, she often cannons against
single bees; and then she may be either mildly
interrogated, fiercely challenged, or may be allowed
to pass with a friendly stroke of the antennae, as
though she were an orthodox member of the hive.
Again, you may see her recognised for a stranger
by three or four workers simultaneously. She will
be surrounded and closely questioned. The bees
draw back and confer among themselves in obvious
doubt. The wasp knows better than to await the
result of their deliberations; by the time they look
for her again, she is gone.

She carries her life in her hand, and well she
knows it. The farther she goes, the more suspicious
and menacing the bees become. Now she has
wild little scuffles here and there with the boldest of
them, but her superior adroitness and pace save her
at every turn. It is about an even wager that she
will reach the brimming honey-cells, load herself up
to the chin, and escape home to her paper-stronghold
with her spoils.

As often as not, however, these hive-robbing
wasps pay the last great price for their temerity.
Those who study bee-life closely and unremittingly,
year after year, find it difficult to escape the con-
clusion that there are certain bees in the crowd who
are mentally and physically in advance of their
sisters. The notion of the old bee-keepers — that
there were generals and captains as well as rank-
and-file in the hive — seems, in fact, to be not
entirely without latter-day confirmation. And it is
just the chance of falling in with one of these bees

THE YELLOW PERIL IN HIVELAND 173

that constitutes, for the wasp, the main risk when
robbing the hives.

If this happens, there is no longer any doubt of
the turn affairs are to take. At an unlucky moment
the wasp brushes against one of these hive-constables
and instead of indifference, or, at most, a spiteful
tweak of the leg or wing in passing, she finds
herself suddenly at deadly grips. The bee's attack
is as swift as it is furious. Seizing the yellow
honey-thief with all six legs, she hacks away at her
with her jaws, at the same time curving her body
inwards with her cruel sting bared to the hilt.
Even now, although more than equal to one bee at
any time, the policy of the wasp is to refuse the fight,
and to run. Her long legs give her a better reach.
She forces her adversary away, disengages, and
charges off towards the dim light of the entrance.

In all that follows, this is the beacon that guides
her. If she could get a clear course, her greater
speed would soon out-distance all pursuit. But the
sudden clash of arms in the quiet of the hive has
an extraordinary effect on the sluggish colony. The
alarm spreads on every side. Wherever the wasp
runs now she is met with snapping jaws and
detaining embraces. As she rushes madly down the
comb, she is continually pulled up in full flight by
bees hanging on to her legs, her wings, her black
waving antennae. A dozen times she shakes them
all off, and speeds on, the spot of light and safety
in the distance ever growing brighter and larger.
But she seldom escapes with her life if affairs have
reached this pass. The way now is alive with
enemies. She is stopped and headed off in all
directions. Trying this way and that for a loophole,

174 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

she finally gives it up and turns on her tracks,
bewildered and panic-stricken, only to rush
straight into the midst of more foes.

The end is always the same. Another of the
stalwarts spies her, and in a moment the two are
locked in berserk conflict. Together they drop
down between the combs and thud to the bottom of
the hive. Here it is hard to tell what happens.
The fight is so fierce and sharp, and the two whirl
round and tumble over and over together so wildly
that you can make out little else than a spinning
blur of brown and yellow. A great bright drop of
honey flies off : in her extremity the wasp has dis-
gorged her spoils. Perhaps for an instant the
warriors may get wedged up in a corner, and then
you may see that they are not lunging at random
with their stilettos, but each is trying for a side-
thrust on the body; these mail-clad creatures are
vulnerable to each other only at one point — the
spiracles, or breathing-holes. Often the wasp deals
the first fatal blow, and the bee drops off mortally
hurt. She may even dispose of three or four of her
assailants thus in quick succession. But each time
another bee closes with her at once. For the wasp
there can only be one end to it. Sooner or later
she gets the finishing stroke.

And then there follows a grim little comedy. The
bee, torn and ragged as she is from the incessant
gnashing of those razor-edged yellow jaws, never-
theless pauses not a moment. She grips her dying-
adversary by the base of the wing, and struggles^ off
with her towards the entrance of the hive. It is a
hard job, but she succeeds at last. Alternately
pushing her burden before her, or dragging it

THE YELLOW PERIL IN HIVELAND 175

behind, at length she wins out into the open, and,
with a final desperate effort, tumbles the wasp over
the edge of the footboard down into the grass
below. Yet this is not enough. The victory must
be celebrated in the old warrior fashion. Rent and
bleeding and exhausted as she is, she finds she can
still fly. And up into the mellow sunbeams of the
October morning she sweeps, giddily and uncer-
tainly, piercing the air with her shrill song of
triumph. Through the murmurous quiet of the
bee-garden, it rings out like a cry in the night.

CHAPTER XXV

THE UNBUSY BEE

TT is well-nigh two months now since the hives
were packed down for the winter, and the
bees are flying as thick as on many a summer's
day.

Yet no one could mistake their flight for the
summer flight. It is not the straight-away eager
rush up into the blue vault of the sunny morning-
high away over hedgerow and village roof-top
towards the clover-fields, whitening the far-off
hillside with their tens of thousands of honey-
brimming bells. It is rather the vagrant, purpose-
less hanging-about of an habitually busy people
forced to make holiday. Through it all there runs
the pathetic interest in trifles, half-hearted and
wholly artificial, that you see among the lolling
crowd of men when a great strike is on — the
thoughtful kicking at odd pebbles; stride-measuring
on the flag-stones; little vortices of excitement got
up over minute incidents that would otherwise pass
unnoticed; the earnest flagellation of memory over
past happenings more trivial still.

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THE UNBUSY BEE 177

still November morning, doing just the things you
would never expect a bee to do. The greater
number of them merely take long desultory reaches
a-wing through the sunshine, going off in one
objectless direction, turning about at the end of a
few yards with just as little apparent reason, coming
back to the hive at length on no more obvious
errand than that, where there is nothing to do,
doing it in another place bears at least the semblance
of achievement.

But many of them succeed in conjuring up, an
almost ludicrous assumption of business. One
comes driving out of the hive-entrance at a great
pace, designedly, as you would think, going out of
her way to bustle the few bees lounging there, as
if the entrance-board were still thronged with the
streaming crowd of summer days foregone. She
stops an instant to rub her eyes clear of the hive-
darkness; tries her wings a little to make sure of
their powers for a heavy load; then, with a deep
note like the twang of a guitar-string, launches out
into the sun-steeped air. But it is all a vain pretence,
and well she knows it. Watch her as she flies, and
you will see her busy ding-dong pace slacken a dozen
yards away. She fetches a turn or two above the
leafless apple-branches of the garden, with the rest
of the chanting, workless crew. She may presently
start off again at a livelier speed than ever, as
though vexed at being allured, even for a moment,
from the duty that calls her away to the mist-clad
hill. But it always ends in the same fashion. A
little later she is fluttering down on the threshold
of the silent hive, and running busily in, keeping up
the transparent fiction, you see, to the last.
M

178 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

An Officious Dame

Many more set themselves to look for sweets
where they must know there is little likelihood of
finding any. Scarce one goes near the glowing
belt of pompons rimming the garden on every side.
But here is one bee, an ancient dame, with ragged
wings and shiny thorax, poised outside a cranny in
the old brick wall, and examining it with serious,
shrill inquiry. She is obviously making-believe, to
while away the time, that it is a choice blossom full
of nectar. She knows it is nothing of the kind;
but that will neither check her ardour nor expedite
the piece of play-acting. She spins it out to the
utmost, and leaves the one dusty crevice at last only
to go through the same performance at the next.

I often wonder wherein lies the fascination to a
hive-bee of an open window or door. Sitting here
ledgering in the little office of the bee-farm — where
no honey, nor the smell of honey, is ever allowed to
come — sooner or later, in the quiet of the golden
morning, the familiar voice peals out. It is
startling at first, unless you are well used to it —
this sudden high-pitched clamour breaking the
silence about you; and the oldest bee-man must lay
down pen or rule, and look up from his work to
scan the intruder.

She has darted in at the door, and has stopped in
mid-air a foot or two within the room. The sound
she makes is very different from that of a bee in
ordinary flight. You cannot mistake its meaning;
it is one long-drawn-out, musical note of exclamation,
an intense,, reiterated wonder at all about her — the

THE UNBUSY BEE 179

subdued light, the walls covered with book-shelves,
the littered table, and the vast wingless, drab-
coloured creature sitting in the midst of it all, like a
funnel-spider in his snare. Bees entering a room in
this way seldom stop more than a second or two,
and, more rarely still, alight. As a rule, they are
gone the next moment as swiftly as they came,
leaving the impression that their quick retreat was
due to a sudden accession of fear; just as children,
venturing into some dark unwonted place, at first
boldly enough, will suddenly turn tail and flee, with
terror hard upon their heels.

But what should bring bees into such unlikely
situations during these warm bright breaks in the
wintry weather, when they seldom or never venture
out of the range of hives and fields in the season of
plenty? It would be curious to know whether
people who have never kept bees, nor handled hives,
are habitually pried upon in this way; or whether
it is only among bee-men the thing occurs. Natur-
alists are commonly agreed that bees possess an
extraordinary sense of smell; indeed, the fact is
patent to all who know anything of hive-life. Now,
years of stinging render the bee-master immune to
the ordinary results of a prod from a bee's acid-
charged stiletto. There is only a sharp prick, a
little irritation at the moment, but seldom any after-
effects of swelling or inflammation, local or general.
But all this injection of formic acid under the skin
year after year might very well have a cumulative
effect, so that the much-stung bee-man would
eventually acquire in his own person the permanent
odour of the hive. And this, scented afar off, may
well be the attraction that brings these roving

180 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

scrutineers to places having, in themselves, no sort
of interest to the winged hive-people.

The Perils of " Immunity "

The mention of stinging brings back a thought
that has often occurred to me. Do lovers of honey
ever quite realise the price that must be paid before
their favourite sweet is there for them on the break-
fast-table, filling the room with the mingled perfume
from a whole countryside? It is easy to talk of
immunity from the effect of bee-stings ; but the truth
is that this immunity means, for the bee-master, no
more than power to go on with his work in spite
of the stinging. And this power is not a permanent
one. It is brought about by incessant pricks from
the living poisoned needle; the ordeal must be
continuous, or the immunity will soon pass away.
Over-care in handling bees is good only up to a
certain point. The bee-man who, by continual
practice, has brought this gentlest art to its highest
perfection, so that he can do what he likes with his
own bees without fear of harm, has, in a sense,
created for himself a kind of fools' paradise. All
the time his once dear-bought privilege is slowly
forsaking him. He is like the Listerist faddist, who
so destroys all disease germs in his vicinity that
his natural disease-resisting organisation becomes
atrophied through want of work. Then, perhaps,
his precautions are upheld for a season, whereupon
a particularly virulent microbe happens by; and,
finding the house empty, swept, and garnished, calls
in the seven devils with a will.

Such a contingency is always in wait for the stay-

THE UNBUSY BEE 181

at-home, never-stung bee-master of neighbourly
proclivities. Sooner or later he will be called to
help some maladroit in bee-craft, whose bees have
been thoroughly vitiated by years of " monkeying."
And then the rod will come out of pickle to a
lively tune. Of course, a little stinging is nothing;
but there is no doubt that, with anything over a
dozen stings or so at a time, the most hardened and
experienced bee-man may easily stand, for a minute
or two at least, in danger of losing his life.

So it happened to me once. I had gone to look
at a neighbour's stocks. The bees were as quiet
as lambs until I came to the seventh hive ; and then,
with hardly a note of warning, they set upon me
like a pack of flying bull-dogs. It is long enough
ago now, but I can still give a pretty accurate
account of the symptoms of acute formic-acid
poisoning. It began with a curious pricking and
burning over the entire inner surface of the mouth
and throat. This rapidly spread, until my whole ;
body seemed on fire, and the target, as it were, for
millions of red-hot darts. Then first my tongue and
lips, and every other part of head and neck, in quick
succession, began to swell. My eyes felt as though
they were being driven out of my head. My
breathing machinery seized up, and all but stopped.
A giddy congestion of brain followed. Finally,
sight and hearing failed, and then almost conscious-
ness.

I can just remember crawling away, and thrusting
head and shoulders deep into a thick lilac bush,
where the bees ceased to molest me. But it was a
good hour or more before I could hold the smoker
straight again, and get on with the next stock.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE LONG NIGHT IN THE HIVE

'"INHERE are few things more mystifying to the
student of bee-life than the way in which
winter is passed in the hive. Probably nineteen out
of every twenty people, who take a merely
theoretical interest in the subject, entertain no
doubt on the matter. Bees hibernate, they will tell
you — pass the winter in a state of torpor, just as
many other insects, reptiles, and animals have been
proved to do. And, though the truth forces itself
upon scientific investigators that there is no such
thing as hibernation, in the accepted sense of the
word, among hive-bees, the perplexing part of
the whole question is that, as far as modern
observers understand it, the honey-bee ought to
hibernate, even if, as a matter of fact, she does not.
For consider what a world of trouble would be
saved if, at the coming of winter, the worker-bees
merely got together in a compact cluster in their
warm nook, with the queen in their midst; and
thenceforward slept the long cold months away,
until the hot March sun struck into them with the
tidings that the willows — first caterers for the year's

182

THE LONG NIGHT IN THE HIVE 183

winged myriads — were in golden flower once more;
and there was nothing to do but rouse, and take
their fill. It would revolutionise the whole aspect
of bee-life, and, to all appearances, vastly for the
better. There would be no more need to labour
through the summer days, laying up winter stores.
Life could become for the honey-bee what it is to
most other insects — merry and leisurely. There
would be time for dancing in the sunbeams, and
long siestas under rose-leaves; and it would be
enough if each little worker took home an
occasional full honey-sac or two for the babies,
instead of wearing out nerve and body in all that
desperate toiling to and fro.

Yet, for some inscrutable reason, the honey-bee
elects to keep awake — uselessly awake, it seems —
throughout the four months or so during which out-
door work is impossible; and to this apparently
undesirable, unprofitable end, she sacrifices all that
makes such a life as hers worth the living from a
human point of view.

Restlessness, and the Reason for It

You can, however, seldom look at wild Nature's
ways from the human standpoint without danger of
postulating too much, or, worse still, leaving some
vital, though invisible thing out of the argument.
And this latter, on a little farther consideration,
proves to be what we are now doing. Prolonged
study of hive-life in winter will reveal one hitherto
unsuspected fact. At this time, far from settling
down into a life of sleepy inactivity, the queen-bee
seems to develop a restlessness and impatience not

184 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

to be observed in her at any other season. It is
clear that the workers would lie quiet enough, if
they had only themselves to consider. They collect
in a dense mass between the central combs of the
hive, the outer members of the company just keep-
ing in touch with the nearest honey-cells. These
cells are broached by the furthermost bees, and the
food is distributed from tongue to tongue. As the
nearest store-cells are emptied, the whole con-
course moves on, the compacted crowd of bees thus
journeying over the comb at a pace which is steady
yet inconceivably slow.

But this policy seems in no way to commend itself
to the queen. Whenever you look into the hive,
even on the coldest winter's day, she is generally
alert and stirring, keeping the worker-bees about
her in a constant state of wakefulness and care.
Though she has long since ceased to lay, she is
always prying about the comb, looking apparently
for empty cells wherein to lay eggs, after her
summer habit. Night or day, she seems always in
this unresting state of mind, and the work of
getting their queen through the winter season is
evidently a continual source of worry to the mem-
bers of the colony. Altogether, the most logical
inference to be drawn from any prolonged and
careful investigation of hive-life in winter is that
the queen-bee herself is the main obstacle to any
system of hibernation being adopted in the hive.
This lying-by for the cold weather, however
desirable and practicable it may be for the great
army of workers, is obviously dead against the
natural instincts of the queen. And since, being
awake, she. must be incessantly watched and fed and

THE LONG NIGHT IN THE HIVE 185

cared for, it follows that the whole colony must
wake with her, or at least as many as are necessary
to keep her nourished and preserved from harm.

The Queen a Slave to Tradition

Those, however, who are familiar with the re-
sourceful nature of the honey-bee might expect her
to effect an ingenious compromise in these as in all
other circumstances; and the facts seem to point
to such a compromise. It is not easy to be sure of
anything when watching the winter cluster in a
hive, for the bees lie so close that inspection
becomes at times almost futile. But one thing at
least is certain. The brood-combs between which
the cluster forms are not merely covered by bees.
Into every cell in the comb some bee has crept,
head first, and lies there quite motionless. This
attitude is also common at other times of the year,
and there is little doubt that the tired worker-bees
do rest, and probably sleep, thus, whenever an
empty cell is available. But now almost the entire
range of brood-cells is filled with resting bees, like
sailors asleep in the bunks of a forecastle; and it is
not unreasonable to suppose that each unit in the
cluster alternately watches with the queen, or takes
her " watch below " in the comb-cells.

That there should be in this matter of wintering
so sharp a divergence between the instincts of the
queen-mother and her children is in no way sur-
prising, when we recollect how entirely they differ
on almost all other points. How this fundamental
difference has come about in the course of ages of
bee-life is too long a story for these pages. It has

186 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

been fully dealt with in an earlier volume by the
same writer — " The Lore of the Honey-Bee " —
and to this the reader is referred. But the fact
is pretty generally admitted that, while the little
worker-bee is a creature specially evolved to suit
a unique environment, the mother-bee remains
practically identical with the mother-bees of untold
ages back. She retains many of the instincts of the
race as it existed under tropic conditions, when there
was no alternation of hot and cold seasons; and
hence her complete inability to understand, and
consequent rebellion against the needs of modern
times.

The Future Evolution of the Hive

Whether the worker-bees will ever teach her to
conform to the changed conditions is an interesting
problem. We know how they have "improved"
life in the hive — how a matriarchal system of
government has been established there, the duty of
motherhood relegated to one in the thirty thousand
or so, and how the males are suffered to live only
so long as their procreative powers are useful to the
community. It is little likely that the omnipotent
worker-bee will stop here. Failing the eventual
production of a queen-bee who can be put to sleep
for the winter, they may devise means of getting
rid of her in the same way as they disburden them-
selves of the drones. In some future age the
mother-bee may be ruthlessly slaughtered at the end
of each season, another queen being raised when
breeding-time again comes round. Then, no
doubt, honey-bees would hibernate, as do so many

THE LONG NIGHT IN THE HIVE 187

other creatures of the wilds; and the necessity for
all that frantic labour throughout the summer days
be obviated.

This is by no means so fantastic a notion as it
appears. Ingenious as is the worker-bee, there is
one thing that the mere man-scientist of to-day
could teach her. At present, her system of queen-
production is to construct a very large cell, four
or five times as large as that in which the common
worker is raised. Into this cell, at an early stage
in its construction, the old queen is induced to
deposit an egg; or the workers themselves may
furnish it with an egg previously laid elsewhere; or
again — as sometimes happens — the large cell may
be erected over the site of an ordinary worker-cell
already containing a fertile ovum. This egg in no
way differs from that producing the common, under-
sized, sex-atrophied worker-bee; but by dint of
super-feeding on a specially rich diet, and unlimited
space wherein to develop, the young grub eventually
grows into a queen-bee, with all the queen's extra-
ordinary attributes. A queen may be, and often
is, raised by -the workers from a grub instead of an
egg. The grub is enclosed in, or possibly in some
cases transferred to, the queen-cell; and, providing
it is not more than three days old, this grub will
also become a fully developed queen-bee.

Hibernation, and no Honey

But, thus far in the history of bee-life, it has been
impossible for a hive to re-queen itself unless a
newly-laid egg, or very young larva, has been
available for the purpose. Hibernation without a

188 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

queen is, therefore, in the present stage of honey-
bee wisdom, unattainable, because there would be
neither egg nor grub to work from in the spring,
when another queen-mother was needed, and the
stock must inevitably perish. Here, however, the
scientific bee-master could give his colonies an
invaluable hint, though greatly to his own dis
advantage. In the ordinary heat of the brood-
chamber an egg takes about three days to hatch,
but it has been ascertained that a sudden fall in
temperature will often delay this process. The
germ of life in all eggs is notoriously hardy; and
it is conceivable that by a system of cold storage,
as carefully studied and ingeniously regulated as
are most other affairs of the hive, the bees might
succeed in preserving eggs throughout the winter
in a state of suspended, but not irresuscitable life.
And if ever the honey-bee, in some future age,
discovers this possibility, she will infallibly become
a true hibernating insect, and join the ranks of the
summer loiterers and merry-makers. But the bee-
master will get no more honey.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BEE-GARDEN

"BOOKS," said the Bee-Master of Warrilow,
looking round through grey wreaths of
tobacco-smoke at his crowded shelves, " books
seem to tell ye most things ne'ersome-matter; but
when it comes to books on bees — well, 'tis somehow
quite another pair o' shoes."

He stopped to listen to the wind, blowing great
guns outside in the winter darkness. The little
cottage seemed to crouch and shudder beneath the
blast, and the rain drove against the lattice-windows
with a sobbing, timorous note. The bee-master
drew the old oak settle nearer to the fire, and sat
for a moment silently watching the comfortable
blaze.

" ' True as print,' " he went on, lapsing more
and more into the quaint, tangy Sussex dialect, as
his theme impressed him; " 'twas an old saying o'
my father's; and right enough, maybe, in his time.
A' couldn't read, to be sure; so a' might have been
ower unsceptical. But books was too expensive in
those days to put many lies into."

He took down at random from the case on the
189

igo THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

chimney-breast about a dozen modern, paper-
covered treatises on bee-keeping, and threw them,
rather contemptuously, on the table.

"I'm not saying, mind ye," he hastened to add,
" that there's a word against truth in any one of
them. They're all true enough, no doubt, for they
contradict each other at every turn. 'Tis as if one
man said roses was white; and another said, ' No,
you're wrong, they're yaller '; and a third said,
' Y'are both wrong, they're red.' And when folks
are in dispute in this way, because they agree, and
not because they differ, there's little hope of ever
pacifying them.

I heard tell once of a woman bee-keeper years
ago, that had a good word about bees. Said she,
' They never do anything invariably ' ; and she
warn't far off the truth. She knew her own sex,
did wise Mrs Tupper. Now, the trouble with the
book-writers on bees is that they try to make a
science of something that can never rightly be a
science at all. They try to add two numbers
together that they don't know, an' that are allers
changing, and are surprised if they don't arrive at
an exact total. There's the bees, and there's the
weather : together the result will be so many
pounds of honey. If the English climate went by
the calendar, and the bees worked according to
unchangeable rules, you might reckon out your
honey-take within a spoonful, and bee-keeping
would be little more than sitting in a summer-house
and figuring on a slate. But with frosts in June,
and August weather in February, and your honey-
makers naught but a tribe of whimsy, sex-thwarted
wimmin-folk, a nation of everlasting spinsters — how

AUTOCRAT OF THE BEE-GARDEN 191

can bee-keeping be anything else than a kind of
walking-tower in a furrin land, when every twist
an' turn o' the way shows something eur'ous or
different? "

He stopped to recharge his pipe from the
earthen tobacco-jar, shaped like an old straw bee-
hive, which had yielded solace to many a past
generation of the Warrilow clan.

" 'Tis just this matter of sex," he continued,
" that these book-writing bee-masters seem to leave
altogether out of their reckoning. And yet it lies
well to the heart of the whole business. In an
average prosperous hive there are about thirty
thousand of these little stunted, quick-witted
worker-bees, not one of which but could have
grown into a fully-developed mother-bee, twice the
size, and laying her thousands of eggs a day, if
only her early bringings-up had been different. But
nature has doomed her to be an old maid from her
very cradle, although she is born with all the
instincts and capabilities for motherhood that you
wonder at in a fully grown, prolific queen. And
yet the bee-masters expect her to accept her fate
without a murmur; to live and work to-day just as
she did yesterday and the day before; to tend and
feed patiently the young bees that she has been
denied all part in producing; to support a lot of
lazy drones in luxury and idleness; and generally
to act like a reasonable, contented, happy creature
all the way through."

He took three or four long, contemplative pulls
at his Broseley clay, then came back to his subject
and his dialect together.

■"Tis no wonder," said he, "that the little

192 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

worker-bee gets crotchety time an' again. Wimmin-
creeturs is all of much the same kidney, whether
'tis bees or humans. Their natur' is not to look
ahead, but just to do the. next thing. They sees
sideways mostly, like a horse with an eye-shade but
no blinkers. But now and then they ups and looks
straight afore 'em, and then 'tis trouble brewing
fer masters o' all kinds, whether in hives or homes
o' men. Lot's wife, she were a kind o' bee-woman;
and so were Eve. I'd ha' been glad to ha' knowed
'em both, bless 'em! The world 'ud be all the
sweeter fer a few more like they. Harm done
through being too much of a woman-creetur is
never all harm in the long run, depend on't."

With his great sunburnt hand he stirred the
flimsy, dog-eared pamphlets about thoughtfully, as
a man will stir leaves with a stick.

" Now, 'tis just this way with bees," he went on.
" If you study how to keep 'em busy, with plain,
right-down necessity hard at their heels, all goes
well. The bees have no time for anything but
work. As the supers fill with honey you take them
off and put empty ones in their place. The queen
below fills comb after comb with eggs, and you
make the brood-nest larger and larger. There is
allers more room everywhere, dropped down from
the skies, like; no matter how fast the stock
increases, nor how much the bees bring in. Just
their plain day's work is enough, and more'n
enough, for the best of them. And so the summer
heat goes by; the honey harvest is ended; and the
bees have had no chance to dwell upon, and grow
rebellious over, the wise wrong that nature has
done their sex. In bee-life 'tis always evil that's

A NATURAL HONEY-BEES NEST

AUTOCRAT OF THE BEE-GARDEN 193

wrought, not by want o' thought, but by too much
of it. Bad beemanship is just giving bees time to
think."

" Many's the time," continued the bee-master,
thrusting the bowl of his empty pipe into the heart
of the wood-embers for lustration, and taking a
clean one down for immediate use from the rack
over his head; " many's the time an' oft it has come
ower me that perhaps bees warn't allers as we see
them now. Maybe, way back in the times when
England was a tropic country, tens of thousands o'
years ago, there was no call for them to live packed
together in one dark chamber, as they do to-day.
If the year was warm all the twelve months
through, and flowers allers blooming, there 'ud be
no need fer a winter-larder, nor fer any hives at all.
Like as not each woman-bee lived by herself then,
in some dry nook or other; made her little nest of
comb, and brought up her own children, happy and
comfortable. Maybe, even — and I can well believe
it of her, knowing her natur' as I do — she kept a
gurt, buzzing, blusterous drone about the place an'
let him eat and drink in idleness while she did all
the work, willing enough, for the two. Then, as
the world slowly cooled down through the centuries,
there came a short time in each year when the
flowers ceased to bloom, and the bees found they
had to put by a store of honey, to last till the heat
and the blossoms showed up again. And there was
another thing they must have found out when the
cold spell was over the earth. Bees that kept apart
by themselves died of cold, but those that huddled
together in crowds lived warm enough throughout
the winter. The more there were of 'em the
N

194 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

warmer they kept, and the less food they needed.
And so, as the winters got longer and colder, the
bee-colonies increased, until at last, from force of
habit, they took to keeping together all the year
round. So you see, like as not, 'tis experience as
has brought 'em to build their cities of to-day, just
as experience, or the One ye never mention, has put
the same thing into the hearts o' men."

A sudden flaw of wind struck the little cottage
with a sound like thunder, and made the cut-glass
lustres on the mantle tinkle and glitter in the
yellow candle-glow. The old bee-man stopped,
with his pipe half-way to his mouth, nodded gravely
towards the window, in a kind of obeisance to the
elements, and then resumed his theme.

" But there's a many things about bees," he said,
" that no man 'ull come to the rights of, until all
airthly things is made clear in the Day o' Days.
The great trouble and hindrance to bee-keeping is
the swarm, and a good bee-master nowadays tries
all he can to circumvent it. But the old habit comes
back again and again, and often with stocks of bees
that haven't had a fit o' it for years. Now, did ye
ever think what swarming must have been in the
beginning? "

He suddenly levelled the pipe-stem straight at my
head.

" Well, 'tis all speckilation, but here's my idee
o' it, for what 'tis worth. Take the wapses:
they're thousands of years behind the honey-bee in
development, and so they give ye a look, so to
speak, into the past. The end of a wapse-colony
comes when the females are ready in November; and
hundreds of them go off to hide for the winter, each

AUTOCRAT OF THE BEE-GARDEN 195

in some hole or crevice, until, in the warm spring
days, each comes out to start a new and separate
home. Well, perhaps the honey-bees did much the
same thing long ago, when they were all mother-
bees, in the time when the world was young. And
perhaps the swarm-fever in a hive to-day is naught
but a kind o' memory of this, still working, though
its main use is gone. The books here will tell ye
o' many other things brought about by swarming,
right an' good enough with the old-fashioned hives.
Yet that gainsays nothing. Nature allers works
double an' treble handed in all her dealings. Her
every stroke tells far and wide, like the thousand
ripples you make when you pitch a stone in a pond."

CHAPTER XXVIII

HONEY-CRAFT OLD AND NEW

'T'HERE never comes, in early April, that first
bright hot day which' means the beginning of
outdoor work on the bee-farm, but I fall to think-
ing of old times with a great longing to have them
back again.

Modern beemanship, at least to the wide-awake
folk in the craft, brings in gold pieces now where
formerly one had much ado to make shillings. But
profit cannot always be reckoned in money. The
old mysteries and the old delusions were a sort of
capital that paid cent per cent if you only humoured
them aright. Bee-men, who flourished when there
was a young queen upon the thrcne, wore their
ignorance as the parson his silk and lawn. It was
something that set them apart and above their
neighbours. All that the bees did was put to their
credit, just for the trouble of a wise wag of the
head and a little timely reticence. The organ-
blower worked in full view of the congregation,
while the player sat invisibly within, so the blower,
after the common trend of earthly affairs, got all
the glory for the tune.

196

HONEY-CRAFT OLD AND NEW 197

There are no mysteries now in honey-craft.
Science has dragooned the fairies out of sight and
hearing as a man treads out sparks in the whin.
But, though the mysteries have gone, the old music
of the hives is still here as sweet as ever. This
morning, when the sun was but an hour over the
hilltop, I rose from my bed, and, coming down the
creaking stair through the silence and half-darkness,
threw the heavy old house-door back. At once the
level sunshine and the song of bees and birds
came pouring in together. There was the loud
humming of bees in the leafing honeysuckle of the
porch, and the soft low note of the hives beyond.
In its plan to-day Warrilow Bee-farm reveals the
whole story of its growth from times long gone
to the present. All the hives near the cottage are
old-fashioned skeps of straw, covered in with three
sticks and a hackle. A little way down the slope
the ancient bee-boxes begin, eight-sided Stewartons
mostly, with the green veneer of decades upon
some of them. Beyond these stand the first rack-
frame hives that ever came to Warrilow ; and thence,
stretching away down the sunny hillside in long
trim rows, are the modern frame-bar hives, spick
and span in their new Joseph's coats of paint, with
the gillyflowers driving golden shafts between
them, until they reach the line of sheds — comb and
honey-stores, extracting-house, and workshops-
marking the distant lane-side.

The Water-carriers

As I stood in the doorway, caught by the mesmeric
sheen of the light and the beauty of the morning, the

19S THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

humming of the bees overhead grew louder and
louder. There were no flowers as yet to attract
them, but in early April the dense canopy of honey-
suckle here is always besieged with bees, directly the
sun has warmed the clinging dewdrops. These were
the water-carriers from the hives. Water at this
time is one of the main necessities of bee-life. With
it the workers are able to reduce the thick honey
and the dry pollen to the right consistency for con-
sumption, and can then generate the bee-milk with
which the young larvae are fed. Later on in the
day the water-fetchers will crowd in hundreds to the
oozy pond-side down in the valley — every bee-garden
has its ancestral drinking-place invariably resorted
to year after year. But thus early the pond-water
is too cold for safe transport by so chilly a mortal
as the little worker-bee; so Nature warms a tem-
porary supply for her here where the dew trembles
like drops of molten rainbow at the tip of each
woodbine leaf.

I drank myself a deep draught from the well that
goes down a sheer sixty feet into the virgin chalk
of the hillside, and fell to loitering through the
garden ways. Though it was so early, the little oil-
engine down below in the hive-making shed was
already coughing shrilly through its vent-pipe, and
the saw thrumming. Here and there among the
hives my men stooped at their work. The pony was
harnessing to the cart, and would soon be plodding
the three-mile-long road to the station with the
day's deliveries of honey. By all laws of duty I
should be down there, taking my row of hives with
the rest — master and men side by side like a string
of turnip-hoers — busy at the spring examination

HONEY-CRAFT OLD AND NEW 199

which, as all bee-men know, is the most important
work of the year. But the very thought of opening
hives, now in the first warm break of April weather
or at any time, filled me with a strange loathing.
So it never used to be, never could be, in the old
days whose memory always comes flooding back
to me at this season with such a clear call
and such a hindrance to progress and duty.
Then I had as little dreamed of opening a hive as
opening a vein. I should have done no more than
I was doing now — passing from one old straw skep
to another through the sweet vernal sunshine, my
boots scattering the dew from the grass as I went,
and looking for signs that tell the bee-man nearly
all he really needs to know. I shut my ears to the
throaty song of the engine. I heard the cart drive
away without a thought of scanning its load. I
got me down in a little nook of red currant flowers
under the wall, where the old straw hives were
thickest, and gave myself up to idle dreams, dreams
of the bees and bee-men of long ago.

I should be splitting elder, thought I; splitting
the long, straight wands to make feeding-troughs.
I called to mind doing it, here on this self-same
bench near upon fifty years ago, with my father,
the woodman, sitting at my elbow learning me.
We split the wands clean and true, scooped out
the pith from each half, and dammed up its ends
with clay. Then, with a handful of these crescent
troughs and a can of syrup, we went the round of the
garden together looking for stocks that were short
of stores. When we found one, we pushed the
hollow slip of elder gently into the hive-entrance as
far as it would go, and filled it with syrup, filling it

200 > THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

again and again throughout the day as the bees
within drank it dry.

The Old Style and the New

A queer figure my father cut in his short grey
smock and his long lean bent legs encased in
leathern gaiters, legs between which, when I was
little, and trotting after him, I had always a fine
view of the sky. He was never at fault in his
estimate of a hive's prosperity. The rich clear
song and steady traffic of a well-to-do bee-nation
he knew at once from the anxious note and frantic
coming and going of a starvation-threatened hive.
It was the tune that told him. Nowadays we just
rip the coverings from a hive and, lifting the combs
out one by one, judge by sheer brute-force of
eyesight whether there be need or plenty. " One-
thirty-two 1 " — from my sunny seat under the pink
currant blossom I can hear the call of the foreman
to the booking 'prentice down in the bee-farm —
" One-thirty-two — six frames covered — no moth —
medium light— brood over three — mark R.Q."
R.Q. means that the stock is to be re-queened at the
earliest opportunity. She has been a famous queen
in her time — One-thirty-two. This would have been
her fourth year, had she kept up her fertility. But
" brood over three " — that is to say, only three
combs with young bees maturing in them — is not
good enough for progressive, up-to-date Warrilow
in April, and she must be pinched at last. In the
common course, I never let a queen remain at the
head of affairs after her second season. Nine out
of ten of them break down under the wear and stress

HONEY-CRAFT OLD AND NEW 201

of two summers, and fall to useless drone-breeding
in the third.

Already the sun has climbed high, and yet I linger,
though I know I should be gone an hour ago. The
darkness, far away as it seems, will not find all done
that should be done on the bee-farm, toil as hard as
we may. For these sudden hot days in spring often
come singly, and every moment of them is precious.
To-morrow the north wind may be keening under an
iron-grey sky, and pallid wreaths of snow-flakes
weighing down the almond-blossom. S'o it happened
only a year ago, when on the twenty-fifth of April I
must clear away the snow from the entrance-boards
of the hives. It is, I think, the unending round of
business — the itch that is on us now of finding a
day's work for every day in the year in modern bee-
craft — which has had most to do with the changed
times. The old leisure, as well as the old colour and
mystery, has gone out of bee-keeping. Between
burning-time in August and swarming-time in May
there used to be .little else for the bee-master to do
but smoke his pipe and ruminate and watch the wax
flowing into the hives. For we all believed that the
little pellets of many-tinted pollen which the bees
constantly carry in on their thighs were not food
for the grubs in the cells, but wax for the comb-
building. I could believe it now, indeed, if I
might only sit here long enough; but the busy
voices are calling, calling, and I must be gone.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE BEE-MILK MYSTERY

A MONG the innumerable scraps of more or less
erroneous information on hive-life, dished up
by the popular newspapers in course of the year's
round, there is occasionally one which is sure to
grip the curious reader's attention. No one expects
nowadays to read of the honey-bee without being
set agape at the marvellous; but, really, when he is
gravely told that the nurse-bees in a hive actually
give the breast to their young, suckling them with
a secreted liquid which is nothing more or less than
milk, the ordinarily faithful newspaper student is
entitled to be for once incredulous.

The thing, however, in spite of its grotesque
improbability, comes nearer to the plain truth than
many another item of bee-life more often encountered
and unquestionably accepted. There are veritable
nurse-bees in a hive, and these do produce some-
thing not unlike milk. In about three days after
the egg has been deposited in the comb-cell by the
queen, or mother-bee, a tiny white grub emerges.
The feeding of this grub is immediately commenced
by the bees in charge of the nursery quarters of the

202

THE BEE-MILK MYSTERY 203

hive, and there is administered to it a glistening
white substance closely resembling thick cream.

Analysts tell us that this bee-milk, as it is called,
is highly nitrogenous in character, and that it has
a decidedly acid reaction. It is obviously produced
from the mouths of the nurse-bees, and appears to
be digested matter thrown up from some part of the
bee's internal system, and combined with the
secretions from one or more of the four separate
sets of glands which open into different parts of
the worker-bee's mouth. The power to secrete this
bee-milk seems to be normally limited to those
workers who are under fourteen or fifteen days old.
After that time the bee runs dry, her nursing work
is relinquished, and she goes out to forage
for nectar and pollen, never, as far as is known,
resuming the task of feeding the young grubs. But
if the faculty is not exercised, it may be held in
abeyance for months together. This takes place
at the close of each year, when we know that the
last bees born to the hive in autumn are those who
supply the milk for the first batches of larvae raised
in the ensuing spring.

It is difficult to keep out the wonder-weaving
mood when writing of any phase of hive-life, and
especially so when we have this bee-milk under
consideration. For all recent studies of the matter
tend to prove several facts about it not merely
wonderful, but verging on the mysterious.

In the first place, its composition seems to be
variable at the will of the bees. The white liquid
is supplied to the grubs of worker, queen, and drone,
and not only is its nature different with each, but
it is even possible that this may be farther modified

204 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

in the various stages of their development. It is
well ascertained that the physical and temperamental
differences between queen and worker-bee, widely
marked as they appear, are entirely due to treatment
and feeding during the larval stage. That the eggs
producing the two are identical is proved by the
fact that these can be transposed without con-
founding the original purpose of the hive. The
queen-egg placed in the worker-cell develops into
a common worker, while the worker-egg, when
exalted to a queen's cradle, infallibly produces a
fully accoutred queen bee. The experiment can
also be made even with the young grubs, provided
that these are no more than three days old, and the
same result ensues.

A close study of the food administered to bees
when in the larval stage of their career is specially
interesting, because it gives us the key to many
otherwise inexplicable matters connected with hive-
life. We do not know, and probably never shall
know, how mere variation in diet causes certain
organs to appear and certain other bodily parts to
absent themselves. If the difference between queen
and worker-bee were simply one of development,
the worker being only an undersized, semi-atrophied
specimen of a queen, there would be little mystery
about it. But each has several highly specialised
organs, of which the other has no trace, just as
each has certain functions reduced to mere
rudimentary uselessness, which, in the other,
possess enormous development and a correspond-
ing importance.

Clearly the food given in each case has peculiar
properties, bringing about certain definite invariable

THE BEE-MILK MYSTERY 205

results. We are able, therefore, to say positively
that most of the classic marvels of bee-life are built
up on this one determined issue, this one logical
adjustment of cause and effect. The hive creates
thousands of sexless workers and only one fertile
mother-bee. It limits the number of its offspring
according to the visible food supplies or the needs
of the commonwealth. It brings into existence,
when necessity calls for them, hundreds of male bees
or drones, and when their period of usefulness is
over it decrees their extermination. When the
queen's fecundity declines, it raises another queen
to take her place. It can even, under certain rare
conditions of adversity, manufacture what is known
as a fertile worker, when some mischance has
deprived it of its mother-bee and the materials for
providing a legitimate successor to her are not
forthcoming. And all these results are primarily
brought about by the one means, the one vehicle of
mystery — this wonderful bee-milk playing its part
at all stages in the honey-bee's life from her cradle
to her grave.

For to track down this subtly-compounded elixir
through all its various uses one must take a survey
of almost the whole round of activities in the hive.
The food of the young larvae, whether of queen or
worker, for the first three days after the eggs are
hatched, seems to consist entirely of bee-milk. The
drone-grub gets an extra day of this richly
nitrogenous diet. And for the remaining two days
of the grub stage of the bee's life milk is given
continuously, but, in the case of the worker and
drone, in greatly diminished supply. Its place
during these two days is largely taken, it is said, by

206 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

honey and digested pollen in the worker's instance,
and by honey and raw pollen for the males.

The queen-grub alone receives bee-milk, of a
specially rich kind and in unlimited quantity, for the
whole of her larval life. This " royal jelly," as
the old bee-masters termed it, is literally poured into
the capacious queen-cell. For the whole five days
of her existence as a larva she actually bathes in it
up to the eyes. But, as far as is known, she
receives no other food during this time. The
regular order of her development, and of that of the
worker-bee, during the five days of the grub stage
has been carefully studied, and it is curious to note
that the very time when the queen's special organs
of motherhood begin to show themselves coincides
exactly with the moment at which the worker-grub's
allowance of bee-milk is cut down and other food
substituted.

This, no doubt, explains why these organs in the
adult worker-bee are so elementary as to be
practically non-existent, and accounts for the
queen's generous growth in other directions. But
it leaves us completely in the dark as to the reason
for the worker's subsequent elaboration of such
organs as the pollen-carrying device, the so-called
wax-pincers, and the wax-secreting glands, of which
the queen possesses none. Nor are we able to see
how the giving or withholding of the bee-milk
should furnish the queen with a long curved sting
and the worker with a short straight one; nor how
mere manipulation of diet can result in making the
two so dissimilar in temperament and mental attri-
butes — the worker laborious, sociable, almost
preternaturally alert of mind, and withal essentially

THE BEE-MILK MYSTERY 207

a creature of the open air and sunshine; the queen
dull of intelligence, possessed of a jealous hatred
of her peers, for whom all the light and colour and
fragrance of a summer's morning have no allure-
ments, a being whose every instinct keeps her, from
year's end to year's end, pent in the crowded tropic
gloom of the hive.

But the bee-milk as well as being the main
ingredient in the larval food, has other and almost
equally important uses. It is supplied by the
workers to the adult queen and drones throughout
nearly the whole of their lives, and forms an indis-
pensable part of their daily diet. And this gives
us a clue in our attempt to understand, not only
how the population of the hive is regulated, but
why the males are so easily disposed of when the
annual drone-massacre sets in. By giving or depriv-
ing her of the bee-milk, the workers can either stim-
ulate the queen to an enormous daily output of eggs
or reduce her fertility to a bare minimum ; and, as for
the drones, it is starvation that is the secret of their
half-hearted, feeble resistance to fate.

Yet though we may recount these things, and
speak of this mysterious essence called bee-milk as
really the mainspring of all effort and achievement
within the hive, it is doubtful whether we have
solved the greatest mystery of all about it. Of what
is it composed, and whence is it derived? The
generally-accepted explanation of its origin is that
it is pollen-chyle regurgitated from the second
stomach of the bee, combined with the secretions
from certain glands of the mouth in passing. But
the most careful dissections have never revealed
anything like bee-milk in any part of the bee's

208 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

internal system. Its pure white, opaque quality has
absolutely no counterpart there : nor, indeed — if
we are to believe latest investigations — does pollen-
chyle exist at all in either the first or second
stomach of the bee, whence alone it could be
regurgitated. Bee-milk, it would seem, is still a
physiological mystery, and so may remain to the end
of time.

CHAPTER XXX

THE BEE-BURNERS

/COUNTRY wanderings towards the end of
^ summer, even now when the twentieth century
is two decades old, still bring to light many ancient
and curious things. Within an hour of London,
and side by side with the latest agricultural
improvements, you can still see corn coming down
to the old reaping-hook, still watch the plough-
team of bullocks toiling over the hillside, still get
that unholy whiff of sulphur in the bee-gardens
where the old-fashioned skeppists are " taking up "
their bees.

Burning-time came round usually towards the end
of August, sooner or later according to the turn of
the season. The bee-keeper went the round of his
hives, choosing out the heaviest and the lightest
stocks. The heaviest hives were taken because they
contained most honey; the lightest because, being
short of stores, they were unlikely to survive the
winter, and had best be put to profit at once for what
they were worth. Thus a complete reversal of the
doctrine of the survival of the fittest was artificially
brought about by the old bee-masters. The most
vigorous strains of bees were carefully weeded out

o 209

210 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

year by year, and the perpetuation of the race left
to those stocks which had proved themselves
malingerers and half-hearts.

There was also another way in which this system
worked wholly for the bad. If a Hive of bees
reached burning-time with a fully charged store-
house, it was probably due to the fact that the stock
had cast no swarm that year, and had, therefore,
preserved its whole force of workers for honey-
getting. Under the light of modern knowledge,
any stall of bees that showed a lessened tendency
towards swarming would be carefully set aside,
and used as the mother-hive for future generations;
for this habit of swarming, necessary under the old
dispensation, is nothing else than a fatal drawback
under the new. The scientific bee-master of to-day,
with his expanding brood-chambers and his system
of supplying his hives artificially with young and
prolific queens every third year, has no manner of
use for the old swarming-habit. It serves but to
break up and hopelessly to weaken his stocks just
when he has got them to prime working fettle.
Although the honey-bee still clings to this ancient
impulse, there is no doubt that selective cultivation
will ultimately evolve a race of bees in which the
swarming-fever shall have been much abated, if not
wholly extinguished; and then the problem of
cheap English honey will have been solved. But
in ancient times the bee-gardens were replenished
only from those hives wherein the swarming-fever
was most rampant. The old bee-keepers, in con-
signing all their heavy stocks to the sulphur-pit,
unconsciously did their best to exterminate all non-
swarming strains.

THE BEE-BURNERS 211

The bee-burning took place about sunset, or as
soon as the last honey-seekers were home for the
night. Small circular pits were dug in some quiet
corner hard by. These were about six or eight
inches deep, and a handful of old rags that had been
dipped in melted brimstone having been put in, the
bee-keeper went to fetch the first hive. The whole
fell business went through in a strange solemnity
and quietude. A knife was gently run round under
the edge of the skep, to free it from its stool, and
the hive carefully lifted and carried, mouth down-
wards, towards the sulphur-pit, none of the doomed
bees being any the wiser. Then the rag was ignited
and the skep lowered over the pit. An angry
buzzing broke out as the fumes reached the under-
most bees in the cluster, but this quickly died down
into silence. In a minute or two every bee had
perished, and the pit was ready for the next hive.

That this senseless and wickedly wasteful custom
should have been almost universal among bee-men
up to comparatively recent times is sufficiently a
matter for wonder; but that the practice should
still survive in certain country districts to-day well-
nigh passes belief. If the art of bee-driving — a
simple and easy method by which all the bees in a
full hive may be transferred unhurt to an empty
one, and that within a few minutes — were a new
discovery, the thing might be condoned as all of
a piece with the general benightedness of mediaeval
folk. But bee-driving was known, and openly
advocated, by several writers on apiculture at least
a hundred years ago. By this method, just as easy
as the old and cruel one, not only do the entire
stores of each hive fall into the undisputed posses-

212 THE BEE-MASTER OF WAKRILOW

sion of the bee-master, but he retains the colony of
bees complete and unharmed for future service.
He has secured all the golden eggs, and the goose
is still alive.

Those who desire to make a start in beemanship
inexpensively might do worse than adopt a practice
which the writer has followed for many years past.
As soon as the time for the bee-burners* work
arrives, a bicycle is rigged up with a bamboo
elongation fore and aft. From this depend a
number of straw skeps tied over with cheese-cloth.
A bee-smoker and a set of driving-irons complete
the equipment, and there is no more to do than sally
forth into the country in search of condemned bees.

It is usually not difficult to persuade the cottage
apiarist to let you operate on his hives. As soon
as he learns that all you ask for your trouble is the
bees, while you undertake to leave him the entire
honey-crop and a ponr-boire into the bargain, he
readily gives you access to his stalls. The work
before you is now surprisingly simple. A few
strong puffs of smoke into the entrance of the hive
under manipulation will effectually subdue the bees.
Then the hive is lifted, turned over, and placed
mouth upwards in any convenient receptacle — a
pail or bucket will do, and will hold it as firmly as
need be. Your own travelling-gear now comes
into use. One of the empty skeps is fitted over
the inverted hive. The two are pinned together
with an ordinary meat-skewer at one point, and then
the skep is prised up and fixed on each side with
the driving-irons, so that the whole looks like a
box with the lid half-raised. Now you have merely
to take up a position in front of the two hives, and

THE BEE-BURNERS 213

begin a steady gentle thumping on the lower one
with the palms of the hands.

At first, as the combs begin to vibrate, nothing
but chaos and bewilderment are observable among
the bees. For a moment or two they run hither
and thither in obvious confusion. But presently
they seem to get an inkling of what is required of
them, and then follows one of the most interesting,
not to say fascinating, sights in the whole domain
of bee-craft. Evidently the bees arrive at a
common agreement that the foundations of their
old home have become, from some mysterious
cause or other, undermined and perilous; and the
word goes forth that the stronghold must be
abandoned without more ado. On what initiation
the manoeuvre is started has never been properly
ascertained ; but in a little while an ordered discipline
seems to spread throughout the erstwhile distracted
multitude. In one solid hurrying phalanx the bees
begin to sweep up into the empty skep. Once
fairly on the march, the process is soon completed.
In eight or ten minutes at most, the entire colony
hangs in a dense compact cluster from the roof of
your hive. Below, brood-combs and honey-combs
are alike entirely deserted. There is nothing left
for you to do now but carefully to detach the upper-
most skep : replace the cheese-cloth, thus securing
your prisoners for their journey to their new home;
and to set about driving the next stock.

CHAPTER XXXI

EVOLUTION OF THE MODERN HIVE

HTHE bee-master, explaining to an interested
novice the wonders of the modern bar-frame
hive, often finds himself confronted by a very awk-
ward question. He is at no loss for words, so long as
he confines himself to an enumeration of the hive's
many advantages over the ancient straw skep — its
elastic brood and honey chambers, its movable
combs interchangeable with all other hives in the
garden, its power of doubling and trebling both
the number of worker-bees in a colony and the
amount of harvested honey; above all, its control
over sanitation and the breeding of unnecessary
drones. But when he is asked the question: Who
invented this hive which has brought about such a
revolution in bee-craft? his eloquence generally
comes to a dead stop. Perhaps one in a hundred of
skilled modern bee-keepers is able to answer the
query. But the ninety-nine will tell you the bar-
frame hive had no single inventor; it came to its
latter-day perfection by little and little — the con-
glomerate result of years of experience and the
working of many minds.

214

EVOLUTION OF THE MODERN HIVE 215

This is, of course, as true of the modern bee-hive
as it is of all other appliances of world-wide utility.
But it is equally true that everything must have had
a prime inception at some time, and through some
special human agency or other; and, in the case of
the bar-frame hive, the honours appear to be pretty
equally divided between two personages widely
separated in the world's history — Samson and Sir
Christopher Wren.

Perhaps these two names have never before been
bracketed together either in or out of print; yet
that the association is not a fanciful, but in all re-
spects a natural and necessary one will not be
difficult to prove.

The story of how Samson, albeit unconsciously,
first gave the idea of the movable comb-frame to
an English bee-master is probably new to most
apiarians. As to whether the cloud of insects
which Samson saw about the carcase of the dead lion
were honey-bees or merely drone-flies, we need not
here pause to determine. We are concerned for the
moment only with one modern explanation of the
incident. This is that, although honey-bees abom-
inate carrion in general, in this particular case the
carcase had been so dried and emptied and purified
by the sun and usual scavenging agencies of the
desert as to leave nothing but a shell — a very
serviceable makeshift for a bee-hive, in fact —
consisting of the tanned skin stretched over the
ribs of the lion.

In the summer of 1834 a certain Major Munn was
walking among his hives, pondering the ancient
Bible narrative, when a sudden brilliant idea
occurred to him. Like most advanced bee-keepers

216 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

of his day, he had long grown dissatisfied with the
straw hive, and his bees were housed in square
wooden boxes. But these, although more lasting,
were nearly as unmanageable as the skeps. The
bees built their combs within them on just the same
haphazard plan; and, once built, the combs were
fixed permanently to the tops of the boxes. Now,
the idea which had occurred to Major Munn was
simply this : He reflected that the combs built by
the bees in the dry shell of the lion-skin were
probably attached each to one of the encircling
ribs; so that, when Samson took the honey-comb,
all he need have done was to remove a rib, bring-
ing the attached comb away with it. Thereupon
Major Munn set to work to make a hive on the rib-
plan, which was composed of a number of wooden
frames standing side by side, each to contain a
comb and each removable at will. Since that time
numberless small and great improvements have
been devised; but, in its essence, the modern hive is
no more than the dried lion-skin distended by the
ribs, as Samson found it on that day when he went
on his fateful mission of wooing.

The part played by Sir Christopher Wren in the
evolution of the bar-frame hive, though not so
romantic, was fraught with almost equal significance
to modern bee-craft. Movable comb-frames were
as yet undreamed of in Wren's time, nearly two
hundred years before Major Munn invented them.
But Wren seems to have been the discoverer of a
principle just as important. This was what latter-
day bee-keepers call " storification." Wren's hive
consisted of a series of wooden boxes, octagonal in
shape, placed one below the other, with inter-

EVOLUTION OF THE MODERN HIVE 217

communicating doors, and glass windows in the
sides of each section. Up to that date bee-hives
had been merely single receptacles made of straw,
plastered wattles, or wood. When the stock had
outgrown its dwelling there was nothing for it but
to swarm. But by the device of adding another
story below the first one, when this was crowded
with bees, and a third or even a fourth if necessary,
Wren was table to make his hive grow with the
growth of his bee-colony or contract with its post-
seasonal decline. He had, in fact, invented the
elastic brood-chamber, which alone enables the bee-
master to put in practice the one cardinal maxim of
successful bee-keeping — the production of strong
stocks.

Wren's octagon storifying hive seems to have
been plagiarised by most eminent bee-masters of his
day and after with the naive dishonesty so character-
istic among bee-men of the time. Thorley's hive
is obviously taken from, indeed, is probably identical
with, that of Wren. The hive made and sold by
Moses Rusden, King Charles II. 's bee-master, is of
almost exactly the same pattern, but it is described
as manufactured under the patent of one John
Geddie. This patent was taken out by Geddie in
1675, and Geddie would appear to be the arch-
purloiner of the whole crew. For it is quite certain
that, having had one of Wren's hives shown to him,
he was not content with merely copying it, but
actually went and patented the principle as his own
idea.

But Wren's hive, good as it was in comparison
with the single-chambered straw skep or wooden
box, still lacked one vital element. Although he

218 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW

and his imitators had realised the advantage of an
expanding bee-hive, this was secured only by the
process of " nadiring," or adding room below.
Thus the upper part of Wren's hive always
contained the oldest and dirtiest combs, and as bees
almost invariably carry their stores upwards, the
production of clear, uncontaminated honey under
this system was impossible. It remained for a
Scotsman, Robert Kerr, of Stewarton, in Ayrshire,
to perfect, some hundred and fifty years later, what
Wren had so ingeniously begun.

Whether Kerr — or " Bee Robin," as he was called
by his neighbours — ever saw or heard of hives on
Sir Christopher Wren's plan has never been
ascertained. But plagiarism was in the air
throughout those far-off times, and there is no
reason to think Kerr better than his fellows. In
any case, the " Stewarton " hive, like Wren's, was
octagon in shape, and had several stories; but these
stories were added above as well as below. By
placing his empty boxes first underneath the
original brood-chamber, to stimulate increase of
population, and then, when the honey-flow began,
placing more boxes above to receive the surplus
honey, " Bee Robin " succeeded in getting some
wonderful harvests. His big supers, full of snow-
white virgin honey-comb, were soon the talk of
Glasgow, where he readily sold them. Imitators
sprang up far and near, and it is only within the
last twenty-five or thirty years that his hives can be
said to have fallen into desuetude.

But probably his success was due not more to his
invention of the expanding honey-chamber than to
two other important innovations which he effected

EVOLUTION OF THE MODERN HIVE 219

in bee-craft. The octagonal boxes of Wren had
fixed tops with a central hole, much lite the straw
hive still used by the old-fashioned bee-keepers to
this day. " Bee Robin " did away with these
fixed tops, and substituted a number of parallel
wooden bars from which the combs were suspended,
the spaces between the bars being filled by slides
withdrawable at will. He could thus, after having
added a story to his honey-chamber, allow the bees
access to it by withdrawing his slides from the out-
side: and when the super was filled with honey-
comb, the slides were again employed in shutting
off communication, whereupon the super could be
easily removed.

This, however, though it greatly facilitated
the work of the bee-master, did not account for
the large yields of surplus honey, which the
" Stewarton " hive first made possible. In the
light of modern bee-knowledge, it is plain that a
big honey-harvest can only be secured by a
corresponding large stock of bees, and Robert
Kerr seems to have been the originator of what
was nothing less than a revolution in the craft.
Hitherto the bee-keeper had estimated his wealth
according to the number of his hives, and the more
these subdivided by swarming, the more prosperous
their owner accounted himself. But " Bee Robin "
reversed all this. He housed his swarms not singly,
but always two at a time; and he made large stocks
out of small ones by the simple expedient of piling
the brood-boxes of several colonies together. In
a word, it was the " Dreadnought " principle
applied to the peaceful traffic of the hives.

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THE LORE
OF THE HONEY-BEE

BY

TIGKNER EDWARDES

OPINIONS OF THE PRESS

" An eminently readable book . . . admirably illustrated,
not unworthy to rank beside the masterpiece of Maurice
Maeterlinck. " — Times.

"It must, of course, sound like grossly exaggerated
praise if one says that a book has appeared in the hustled
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the interest, charm, and ' personality ' of Mr Edwardes'
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joys in printers' ink." — World.

" A wholly charming- book that should become a

classic. Nothing; quite so good, or written with such com-
plete literary skill, has appeared from an English printing-
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select bookshelf that holds ' The Compleat Angler ' and
George Herbert's ' Temple ' " — County Gentleman.

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much delicate literary art." — Daily Telegraph.

" A fascinating tale. . . . Quite into the front rank of
writers steps Mr Edwardes, who, in ' The Lore of the Honey-
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worth reading for its literary charm alone." — Daily Mail.

" A volume which shows up the life of the bee in fresh
and brilliant facets — a book which every bee-lover will
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" All the virtues of Maeterlinck's well-known prose epic,
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clearest and best photographs of bee economy that we have
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